Ernesto Pujol Exhibition and Fall Events

Exhibition: Walk #1
Dates: August 25-October 23, 2008
Gallery Reception: Friday, October 3, 5-8:30pm with a lecture by Ernesto Pujol beginning at 7:00pm


Light Work is pleased to announce our new exhibition, Walk #1, featuring the work of Ernesto Pujol.

The black-and-white digital images in this exhibition follow a figure clad in a black robe, Pujol himself, walking through a Civil War cemetery in South Carolina. The photographs are arranged in sequential order in the gallery, depicting a dialogue between the figure, nature, and architecture. According to René Paul Barilleaux, "A lush Southern landscape, ornate Victorian cast ironwork, carved marble statuary, and other picturesque elements appear as a counterpoint to the dark, nearly motionless walker."

Pujol conceived this series as a combination between a performance (the walking) and installation. According to Pujol, he had avoided going to the cemetery for some time, but "When I first set foot in that city of the dead, I suddenly realized that it was the familiar environment I had dreamed about for years. I had experienced recurring dreams of marble arches and colonnades surrounded by gated gardens and water." After beginning to photograph the area in a documentary style, he quickly realized that he needed to walk through the space in a performative way, which resulted in the photographs depicted in this exhibition.

In addition to the digital images, this exhibition also features the black robe worn in the photographs, displayed on a mannequin in the center of the gallery, as well as twelve small, framed, hand-blown glass plates hanging on the wall with the images. Each plate has a word painted on it, meant to evoke a personal or emotional response from the viewers in the gallery.

Pujol was born in Cuba and grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He received his BA in humanities and painting from the Universidad de Puerto Rico, and his MFA in interdisciplinary art practice from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited internationally, and he has received numerous awards and fellowships. In addition, Pujol's work is included in various permanent collections, including at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, TX; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University; Casa de las Americas in Havana, Cuba; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; among many others. He participated in Light Work's Artist-in-Residence program in 1999.

Light Work will host a gallery reception to celebrate these exhibitions on Friday, October 3 from 5-8:30pm, with a lecture by Ernesto Pujol beginning at 7:00pm. This event is part of the Visible Memories Conference, which is presented by the Visual Arts and Cultures Cluster of The Central New York Humanities Corridor, made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Corridor is a large-scale partnership with Syracuse University, Cornell University, and the University of Rochester that connects scholarship in five other cluster areas: philosophy, linguistics, religions and cultures, musicology/music history, and humanities at the interface of science/technology. For more conference information visit http://publicmemories.syr.edu.

Exhibition: Images of a Girl, Images of a Woman
Dates: August 25-October 23, 2008
Lecture: Pastiche, Performance, and Portraiture (and the Imponderable Hazards of Publishing Photographs), featuring presenters Gina Murtagh, Kim Waale, and Julie Grossman. Monday, September 8, 6:00pm

Also on view at this time, in Light Work's hallway gallery, is an exhibition titled Images of a Girl, Images of a Woman featuring the work of Rita Hammond. A nationally recognized artist and photographer, Hammond (1924-1999) was a dynamic and greatly admired presence in the Central New York art community. With audacity, intelligence, and humor, Hammond's work reflected on major figures from the history of art and photography. Images of a Girl, Images of a Woman offers a body of photographs from Hammond's long-time collaboration with Lynn Moser. The series juxtaposes images of Moser as a young girl in 1967 with images of her as a woman twenty years later, revealing the dramatic and intimate effects of time, reflected in both the subject and the perspective of the photographer.

A lecture titled Pastiche, Performance, and Portraiture (and the Imponderable Hazards of Publishing Photographs) will be presented by Gina Murtagh, Kim Waale, and Julie Grossman on Monday, September 8, 2008 at 6:00pm in relation to this exhibition. Freelance photographer, curator, and arts educator Gina Murtagh has worked with Light Work and Syracuse University Press to publish a book on the Images of a Girl, Images of a Woman series of images. Hammond's series A Due Voci is also on view at this time in the Community Darkrooms exhibition space. Sculptor and professor of art Kim Waale, along with associate professor of English Julie Grossman, published a book in 2003 featuring Hammond's work from the A Due Voci series.

Event: Argentina - Beyond the Prison Walls: An Evening with Paula Luttringer and Margarita Drago
Event Date: Tuesday, September 16, 6:00pm

This joint presentation features two Argentine artists who suffered exile and compulsory silence: photographer Paula Luttringer and memoirist Margarita Drago. The free event, aligned with the "migration" theme of Syracuse Symposium, will take place Tuesday, September 16, 2008 at 6:00pm.

Born in La Plata, Argentina, Luttringer went into exile after being kidnapped as a college student in 1977 and held for five months in a secret detention center. Upon returning to Argentina in 1995, she turned to photography as a means of expressing the intersection between her country's recent history and her own story. During the program, Luttringer will show and discuss some of her images. Also a political prisoner, Drago is the author of numerous newspaper and journal articles, and of the best-selling memoirs, Memory Tracks: Fragments From Prison (1975-1980) (Editorial Campana, 2007). At the event, Drago will read excerpts of Memory Tracks in Spanish, with English translations. The evening will continue with an audience discussion and readings of testimonies from women unlawfully imprisoned by the Argentine military.

Luttringer's photography is part of the permanent collections of the National Museum of Fine Arts and Museum of Modern Art, both in Buenos Aires; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y.; Portland Art Museum in Oregon; La Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris; and the Portuguese Photography Centre in Portugal. In addition to speaking at SU, Luttringer will spend a month as a Light Work Artist-in-Residence, working on a book about Argentine women. A resident of the United States since 1980, Drago is professor of Spanish language and literature and of bilingual education at York College of the City University New York. She also is vice president of the Latino Artists Round Table (LART), for which she organizes lectures, presentations, and conferences at universities and cultural centers.

This event is a collaboration between Light Work, Syracuse Symposium, and the Latino-Latin American Studies program (LLAS) of Syracuse University. Syracuse Symposium is a semester-long intellectual and artistic festival celebrating interdisciplinary thinking, imagining, and creating, presented by The College of Arts and Sciences to the entire Syracuse community. Other symposium events can be found at http://www.syracusesymposium.org/schedule.html.

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