STATEMENT OF WORK

Lisa di Donato is a lens-based artist working in New York. Using photography as a material, tool, and language, she works across digital, analogue and manual processes such as hand-rendering. Many of the resulting artworks have undergone interventions or translations to become something wholly different from their origin.

Architecture, landscape, anatomy, and artifacts of various natures are her primary sites of investigation. Depicted as being no longer, nor have they become something else, yet, they are part of a continuous artistic and existential process that manifests in unpredictable forms realized with a certain autonomy from any previously known thing. They and she operate in the in-betweenness of the two-dimensional and three-dimensional, light and lightless, the representational and nonrepresentational, and of limits and limitlessness. All of this attends to an ongoing fascination with the complexities of becoming, experience, perception and reality.

Ontic Glow combines two disparate technologies: the old mass-medium of tintypes with new mass-media imagery found in Google Earth's 3D ground view to reproduce surreal and remote panoramic sites and spaces generated by algorithms in wet plate collodion’s tangible materiality. Irregularities inherent in the photograph's physical chemistry interact with the accidents found in the digital digestion and projection of space. The tintype images raise and blur the distinction between the indexical photographic reproduction of reality and its generation of pictures without a discrete referent.

People ask technology to show them what to see before ever seeing it for themselves so that by now everywhere is familiar but strange. In Google Earth, 98% of the Earth’s surface has been reduplicated into another world that, born from observation, paradoxically sits in a new beyond unaffected by observers, at least, conscious ones. Only traces of inhabitance appear in the intangible landscapes as if the future had already been colonized and abandoned.