Live Load
A photographic exhibition by Frank Abruzzese
14th June – 12th July 2014
Artist Talk: Frank Abruzzese will present a talk on his current exhibition on Saturday 26th June at 2pm.
Wexford Arts Centre is delighted to announce the launch of ‘Live Load’, an exhibition of work by contemporary artist Frank Abruzzese.
Abruzzese’s work is process driven, and seeks to demonstrate photography’s power to reveal as much as it hides. His work is informed by interests in engineering and problem solving, new technologies, symmetry, science fiction, landmarks, repetition, traces and monuments. His working methods are often experimental, employing unorthodox film selection, exposure time and digital photographic techniques to transform often mundane subjects into something extraordinary, ambiguous or uncanny, and question photography’s role as a factual document.
The photographic process used to make Live Load was adapted from Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii’s images of the Russian countryside in the early 1900’s. Among the earliest colour photographs, the work pre-dated colour film technology. Gorskii used a specialized camera to take three black and white photographs in rapid succession, each frame with a red, green or blue filter placed in front of the lens. They were then recombined and projected with their corresponding filtration to reveal full colour images. Abruzzese’s adaptation of this technique slows down the process so that the subjects in his resulting images, a cow grazing in a field or a tourist wandering an archaeological site, are frozen in a single channel of light, appearing cyan, magenta or yellow. His practice marks time, and maps behaviour and engagement with the landscape. Rather than capturing a single moment Abruzzese’s photographs capture a sequence, but may also be understood as a cycle of time; points and locations where on any given day similar activities can be encountered.
Originally from Philadelphia, Frank obtained his Bachelors Degree in Moving Image Arts from the College of Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2000, and Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004. He is the recipient of the Emerging Photographer of the Year award from San Francisco Magazine, and as a photographer exhibits internationally in galleries and universities. In 2007, he co-founded Cow House Studios, a progressive artist studio set in rural Wexford with his wife, artist Rosie O’Gorman.
Live Load will run in Wexford Arts Centre from Saturday 14th June to Saturday 12th July 2014 and galleries are open Monday to Saturday from 10am-5pm.
For further information on the exhibition please contact Catherine Bowe, Visual Arts Manager on +353 (0)53 9123764 or email catherine@wexfordartscentre.ie. For further information and to view additional work by Frank Abruzzese please click here.
