Exhibiting a selection of works from Marco Craig’s ANTHROPOCENE FOSSILS and Francesca Galliani’s INCROLLABILE
All images and information on the works belonging to these projects can be seen at the following LINK
ANTHROPOCENE FOSSILS is a research work on iconic objects linked to the world of luxury that have been transformed into fossils through a very personal and elegant vision. Leaving them behind for posterity as affirmation of how radically humans have been and are responsible for the changes in the climate and living conditions of our planet.
Anthropocene: the term used to define the current geological era, in which man has managed – through territorial, structural and climatic changes – to impact geological processes.
When we speak of ‘fossils’, or even simply when we say the word ‘fossil’, in 87 percent of cases, the brain processes an image that refers to a shape impressed in flint. Usually a plant or an animal.
Deposits of sediment remain preserved for centuries in the layers of the earth’s crust. Unbeknownst to them, one age succeeds another. And today?
Today there are other phenomena that mark time as we know it. Although less natural, these phenomena are equally impactful.
Fashion is one of them. Fashion dictates time and defines eras. It leaves an imprint, sometimes even becoming one with human anatomy.
If in a hypothetical distant future a palaeontologist went looking for fossils, what would he find?
To provide a plausible answer one would have to crystallize the idea of the passage of time. Showing us contemporary fossils that will no longer be contemporary – starting from a not too distant tomorrow. Because the very idea of a ‘fossil’ is changeable in itself.
What has been, coincides with what will be.
TECHNICAL INFORMATION:
Photography, fine art pigment prints on canvas, mixed media on DBond or acid free support, museum glass and oak frames – different formats.
5 pieces + 1 a.p. – each one becoming a Unique Piece after the artist’
s personal intervention on the final print with charcoal, collage and/or acrylic paint.
INCROLLABILE (UNWAVERING): after almost twenty years, these unique photographs have emerged from Francesca Galliani’s archives (photographs that Francesca printed in analogue and selenium and sepia toned herself); the unchanged tension given by the combination of faces and bodies, – only apparently unambiguous in genre – is expressed by the intertwining of seduction, tenderness, introspection, discouragement, defiance and triumph, on the subject of genre at a time when it was not easy, comfortable or in any way as “fashionable” as it is today.
In the depiction of people, as in all her work, Galliani’s portraits exude a longing for emotions and an attempt to capture what is most fleeting: the process of becoming. In this perspective, the artist and her subjects evolve together. The transitory nature of place provides a backdrop for the more psychologically probing and difficult metamorphosis of personal identity. Often gorgeous by any measure of conventional beauty, each portrait has a formal power achieved through pose, lighting, and the artist’s masterful experimentation with the photographic printing process. “But words or images that float within their portrait settings, like the meaning-laden props in a domestic scene by Vermeer, sometimes hint at the more tragic aspects of life experience: “stop misery,” “trash,” “fight back,” smash gay oppression.”*
Able to pass from analogue photography processed with manual interventions, to painting and collage, as a desire to add more, to intensify the emotion captured by the photo, she often brings the attention back to female issues not only of a social nature such as violence against women or the rights of transgenders, but to a vision of dense and powerful women, courageous and unconventional, strong in a delicious inner chaos and free from any compromise or social subordination.
*Peggy Fogelman – Norma Jean Calderwood Director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts.
TECHNICAL INFORMATION:
silver gelatine fine art analogue prints – selenium and sepia hand toned with manual interventions – framed. Unique pieces – Cm 30x 30, 30×40 50×50 50×60
