Faculty News: Marking Matters in Time Exhibition displayed at Gallery R
marking matters In time by Patti Russotti
“Marking Matters In Time” was an exhibition of collections, recollections, and art work that was made in response to life (and death) events of the last several years. It was displayed at Gallery R December 1-5, 2017.
My partner was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic prostate cancer August 2010 and died August 2015. My daily practice at the time was to document our lives during this time including treatments, events, celebrations, and life. The some images from that time were printed on Kozo (Japanese mulberry paper) with stitched and glued pockets for hanging rods. Cold or hot wax was applied to each piece to seal the image and to make them more accessible to the viewer (no glass, matte or frame). In one gallery, each piece was hung from the ceiling, away from the wall to allow the work to move – as if each image danced with one another as well as with the viewer. The shadows created by the hanging images and the uneven bottom line were purposeful to add to a sense of disorientation.
In another room in the gallery, an installation of images/snapshots from August 2010 to August 2015 was displayed. This sampling of my experience is presented as contact prints, printed on canvas and cotton in lengths of 9 – 12 feet. The viewer was able to walk between each unfurling sheet, unroll the bottom scrolls, look up, down, sideways and, again, feel disoriented.
“marking matters In time”
Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance (Rilke). It is also an act of possibility. We come to see through our stories. The work asks how we remember but it also considers how it is when we produce work that influences our recollections. It asks what senses, what materials, what gathering, cutting, lifting, and collecting anchor memories, or stage their decaying beauty as a transition for new ones are required for exhibition and experience.
The object or the memory, which came first? We embed memory in physical remnants of our lives in the hope that we never forget, or we might be allowed a selective and elemental remembering. The collections are formed in the hope that if we do forget, the object might remain to remind someone else. This enables another story. Making is dynamic and always undergoing transformation influenced by the weight of things but includes influences from an imagined future that isn’t yet made or for an imagined person who hasn’t yet noticed.
Found and re-presented objects symbolize our engagements with nature as we navigate living, loss, aging and grief or as we imagine what can yet become of them. Like the elements of nature, beings and their offerings are vulnerable to invisibility, to the melancholy beauties of decay, which are here affirmed and ritualistically intoned.
What’s unseen are the flows of time; the walks that people made to see these things; the hands that grasped them; the curious intimacy of the iphone that helped collect them; the tonal and digital processing that made its way back to the hand-made and vulnerable. Things in transition have a beauty in their decomposition. They aren’t done becoming something else when they change positions in the world.
This Exhibition was created to investigate discrete collections of memory; the many layers we wrap around the day to day, for remembering, for letting go, or for discovering what in the process has become possible.
Exhibition Details:
The work includes a scan-o-gram which were then drawn, painted, marked, and often mixed with other images. All work is available on a variety of substrates (Kozo, Bamboo, Silk, linen and cotton) and sizes. Please contact Patti at patti.russotti@rit.edu for more information and pricing. 
