The Museum of Innocence at FotoFest 2020

If you follow this blog, you know how important FotoFest Biennial has been for me, for its role in the world of contemporary photography. Its international, groundbreaking exhibition give deep thought to topics, angles and geographic areas that are not well know outside of their boundaries; a rich community and meeting place for photography curators, museum professionals and gallerists with photographers and connoisseurs. For me personally FotoFest has been crucial in my work as a photographer with its inspiration to a larger international community.

The Haunted Archive

 

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An exhibition that has been in the works for several months is opening on March 1 at the Fort Worth Community Art Center in Fort Worth, TX. The Haunted Archive is an exhibition of post-photography, curated by me and featuring photographs, paintings, collages and installations by eight artists, based throughout the United States.

It includes works by Rachel Black, Kimberly Chiaris, Angela Johnson, Priya Suresh Kambli, Devon Nowlin, elin o’Hara slavick, JP Terlizzi and Melanie Walker.

This exhibition explores the vernacular family photograph as a visual, emotional and social topos.

Two Italian Masters

 

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When American troops disembarked in Sicily (1943), some soldiers stationed in Palermo had their portrait done by local painter Benedetto Zangara. They also brought their military-ration powdered milk and hard biscuits for his baby son. Then the war ended and the baby grew with the stories that he owed his life to those biscuits and those soldiers. He also grew up to be an artist and today is one of the pillars of the international MADI movement.

Possible Convergences

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The 091 Projects/Rizzuto Gallery in Palermo, showed my work along with artist Stefania Fabrizzi. Titled Possible Convergences (June 31-July 14), the two-person exhibition was curated by Cristina Costanzo, an art scholar, critic and writer.

My work included in this show was from the portfolio Hidden Metrics ID. However, it ultimately made for a different exhibition because of the different format it has evolved in.

The Museum of Home Touch

The Museum of Home Touch, a participatory installation at Sunset Art Studios. May 12, 2018

As I mentioned in my previous post, during my residency at Sunset Art Studios I worked on a series of cyanotypes that combined physical traces of a home, memory and the physical experience related to them. In these photograms, home could be seen through objects associated with it that physically touched the surface of the fabric or paper and so transferred the sense of presence to the photographic representation.

But along with that ongoing project, I worked on another one that had been on my idea list for some time. 

Neighborhoods of the Heart

Neighborhoods of the Heart, at Sunset Art Studios

Last December, I was invited to be the visiting artist at the Center for Creative Connections at the Dallas Museum of Art in the summer of 2018. This great honor involved developing a series of programs, based on my artistic process and concept, to connect visitors of the museum to the works in the collection and a larger idea.

Hidden ID at Savignano sul Rubicone, Italy

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My first solo exhibition in Italy will open next week at Savignano sul Rubicone. It will be in conjunction with SI Fest Off, a festival of photography in its 26th edition, and is related to this year’s theme of the festival: Dialectic Strategies.

Hidden ID is a series of pinhole images that juxtapose public identity to interior privacy through using the metaphor of the archive as a substitution for the construction of the self. The images are based on a hybrid pinhole capture with in-camera photogram elements. 

Fashion photography in a new light (Bruce Weber at the Dallas Contemporary)

 

Lonneke Engel for Versus, 1996, gracefully shot by Bruce Weber

Bruce Weber, a noted fashion photographer with a long and distinguished career, is having a retrospective exhibition at the Dallas Contemporary. It is fascinating for many reasons, but first of all because an exhibition venue known mainly for installations and projections has dedicated almost its entire gigantic space to a solo show of this kind of “traditional” photography. But also – and especially – because it offers an unusual view of fashion photography as it is.

Tablecloths, a solo exhibition at Langdon Center, Tarleton University

 

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If you are in Texas, you are invited to my solo exhibition Tablecloths at Langdon Center (Tarleton University), in Granbury, TX.

Reception: October 29, 5-8pm
Visit: Oct 31 ottobre – Dec 14, 2016
Langdon Center, 308 E Pearl St. Granbury, TX
Hours: 10am-4pm, Mon-Sat

The exhibition includes a series of large format cyanotype photograms on silk and cotton that simultaneously presents and questions the idea of home, using the centerpiece of the tablecloth as a conceptual device. Using 3-dimensional surfaces in tables, corners, steps and thresholds, the photo-sensitive fabric captures shadows and direct contact and then fixes the ephemeral sensation of feeling at home through the photographic process. Still, thanks to the optical distortions (and the added stains)  home looks like a perceptual illusion. 

The Floating Piers by Christo as a quasi religious experience

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It was a privilege to walk  Christo’s Floating Piers on the first day of the project. They are the ultimate sensorial experience: all about touch, vision, and whole body mobilization: it felt so light yet the day after everything feels sore.

The Skin of Memory in a solo exhibition at the FWCAC

After several years of hard work, I am preparing my project The Skin of Memory for a solo show at the Fort Worth Community Art Center coming up in early January. It was an honor to be selected by the exhibition committee and debut a body of work that has taken so much to research, experiment and think about.

Hope you can come!

Recent and upcoming exhibitions

Well, it was a very eventful three months! Now that the semester is (almost) over and I am back up for air, here is what has been happening the meantime.

Exhibition opportunities in university galleries

The Union Gallery at UNT. The building is currently under reconstruction and the gallery will not available until 2016.

Many artists, including photographers, are not aware of the exhibition opportunities in university galleries, yet they are some of the best places to make your work known to a great audience. Not only are university galleries places where you can start a dialogue with the budding artists who are students in these academic institutions, but they are visited by invited curators and others – not to speak of the faculty.

Also, since universities are intellectual communities first and foremost, the dialogue that an art exhibition establishes goes beyond art appreciation and connects with concerns of broader interest; it participates in the intellectual debates on campus.

CADD FUNd: an invitation

Here is something exciting to which I would like to invite you!

Contemporary Art Dealers of Dallas, the umbrella organization of Dallas art galleries, is organizing, for the first time, CADD FUNd: a fun, fast-paced evening of sharing innovative ideas about potential artistic projects. CADD FUNd will make possible a high-impact idea that needs the support of the Dallas-Fort Worth community. I am very excited to announce that I have been selected as one of 6 finalists for this event!

CADD FUNd was inspired by similar events throughout the U.S. such as Feast in Brooklyn, Incubate in Chicago and Spread in Santa Fe. Numerous organizations have taken the basic premise of a Sunday soup supper – collect creative proposals, invite the public to pay, eat, listen, and then vote for a winner – and adapted it to their own local purposes. The winner will receive the funds raised by the attendance tickets to finance his or her project.

I would love to have the honor of your presence at the evening as my fellow artists and I share our work and projects. Regardless of whether I win or not, it is a really great chance for me to speak about a new exciting work in progress to an audience that deeply cares about art. Hope to see you there!

To purchase tickets or for more information, follow this link: http://www.caddallas.net/wp/cadd-fund-2/

 

 

 

Good news recently

Texas Artist Coalition juried exhibition, August 2014

I haven’t written for a few months – things have been very busy around here: a few exhibitions, a long list of readings postponed for the summer, some exciting research in a couple of Italian photography archives.

Here are a few of the things that I have been up to lately.

It was an honor to form part of the Fort Worth Art Collective, a newly established group of artists based in Fort Worth working in different media but unified by an ambitious vision of contemporary art. We already had two exhibitions and were called, as per the Star-Telegram, the pop-up du jour.

Texas Artist Coalition holds a juried show once a year and I was thrilled to be invited, since my first exhibition ever was exactly there 5 years ago. Moreover, what a beautiful surprise the day of the opening reception: juror Judy Tedford Deaton, Chief Curator of the Grace Museum, gave me the Fort Worth Art Dealers Association Award. The participating artwork is right behind me above.