DAMP EDGE
Works by Pam Longobardi and Craig Dongoski

August 21 - September 14

Reception: Sunday, August 27, 2 PM

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These collaborative works on paper by Craig Dongoski and Pam Longobardi are the result of a dual artist residency fellowship at the Franz Masereel Centrum in Kasterlee, Belgium. The Centrum is an independently operating artist colony and studio environment supported by the cultural ministry of the Belgian government. Additional support was given through the Cushman Foundation Grant of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Research Initiation Grant of the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgian State University in Atlanta. Common ground was found between Dongoski's and Longobardi's use of photography, not as a primary art form, but as an obsession for documenting and recording visual impressions. With the exception of a single series of Longobardi's (Visible/Invisible, 1991-00), neither artist had produced work originating solely in the photographic material documentation. Because of this commonality and the two extensive archives, this became the starting point of the collaboration.

"We used the diptych format for many of the works because both of us are interested in dualities, contradictions, and juxtapositioning. Initially, we pulled from our collections of photographs we had taken individually, ones we shot on trips together to Caracas, Cape Cod and Los Angeles, and slides recovered from my grandfather's mass of material. My grandfather was an obsessive amateur photographer, and we had most of his shots stored in our basement while I was growing up. A flood damaged and destroyed most of his material, but when I opened the boxes after all these years, we were amazed to discover some incredible alterations that had occurred as the emulsion melted and molded. We sorted through hundreds of these, and pulled the pieces that had the most poetry, their defacement somehow transforming them into something new and mysterious. Many of the images are actually of me, when I was around two years old, in my parent's first apartment, at my 2nd birthday party, etc. These were taken from a box with a particular kind of partially obscurring damage , where one part of the image remained intact and another part was morphed into fantastic fractal forms or smoke clouds, or crystallization."

Two images were combined in juxtaposition, scanned, and with no further computer manipulation, printed out as large scale (36 x 47) Iris prints on the SMFA's printer. These were the raw starting points for the hand-manipulation that was done in the 2 1/2 week residency in Belgium. Most of the treatment was done with water-based screen inks, raw pigment and hand painting. What seemed to emerge in this phase was a union of the visual dualities represented in the images, and this presented itself as the classic moral dilemma of the vice/ virtue.

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