Please join us at the Wagner College Gallery for “Impermanence,” an exhibition of six works derived from photographic processes on a variety of materials (fabric, paper, acrylic, video projection) and an installation consisting of found/appropriated objects by Bruno Zorzal, on display through Friday, May 19.
A gallery reception with the artist will be held on Tuesday, April 4 from 12 to 1:30 p.m.
Both the reception and the exhibition are free and open to the public.
The gallery is located in the Union Building on the Wagner College campus at 631 Howard Ave., Staten Island.
The Wagner College Gallery is open every day from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
“Impermanence,” according to Zorzal, “investigates our paradigmatic historical moment, in which existences — and even individual and collective aesthetics and ethics — are transitory or fleeting.”
The artist’s statement expands upon this narrative:
Through historical and artisanal photographic processes, appropriated anonymous portraits are enlarged on different surfaces — paper, fabric, acrylic — some of which were found and repurposed by the artist. Among the works created are photographic enlargements, installations, videos and objects. From the manipulations that these photographic processes allow, the photos of anonymous faces continue to change in the presence of light. Transforming before your eyes, some even disappear. In the end, only the technical apparatus remains, the photosensitive substances, material that was once an image. Revealing erasure and transience, these portraits embody the instability that runs through our realities.
To represent individuals and their realities, crisscrossed by different threads and tensions, an image that is subject to various flows, eternally in process, is necessary. The contemporary production and dissemination of images leads to a context where the process of photography is sabotaged, at a time where photo-temporal processes also include GIFs, Snapchats, Tik Tok, Instagram stories, selfies: images born in the flow of the internet by and for screens.
“Impermanence” wonders how technical images can influence and shape our apprehension of reality. Its unstable images recall an era of political uncertainty and heightened anxiety imbuing the exhibition with a transcendental quality that offers a metaphor for the fragility of our condition.
Bruno Zorzal lives in Vitória, the capital of Espírito Santo, a state on Brazil’s central Atlantic coast. After working as a photojournalist in Vitória for three years, he went to study photography in Rome. Later, in Paris, he deepened both his practice and his understanding of the theory of art and photography. In 2016, he completed his doctorate in aesthetics, science and the technology of visual arts and photography at University Paris 8, research that generated two books.
For more information about the Wagner College Gallery, contact gallery director Philip Cartelli at philip.cartelli@wagner.edu.
