© Lisa Di Donato, from the series "Untitled House Study"

Lisa di Donato began her journey as a painter, started by her father. But then at the college, the stimulus wears off relatively quickly. Reasons were lacking. Somehow she got the feeling that a detour had already happened and that there wasn't something at stake. I am always keen on these kinds of arguments, especially when considering how photography and the advent of mechanized reproduction of the visible have provided a significant evolutionary push to painting beyond its boundaries and historical definitions. Captured by the notion of the void, and therefore of abstraction, Lisa feels the need to search for new leads, a bit like a pioneer who pursues to occupy unknown fertile lands. In short, this is the spark that ignites change, leading her to experiment with photography, sculpture, and the built environment concept. Architecture is what makes the void habitable, she tells me, quoting a friend of her. Her father also works in construction, and I guess this makes it all more familiar. Still, the use of models, materials, surfaces, and hands all come from painting and survives in Lisa's work but on another level, different, somehow decontextualized. Photography is a way of abstracting, subtracting from reality, from time. She builds models and then photographs them to take them out of a stream, out of a current. To isolate, freeze them. Conceptually there is an affinity with the late Sixties visionary work of Superstudio. The Italian architectural group never really built anything but used every possible medium to criticize and challenge architecture. After all, Lisa suggests, it is easier to deconstruct profession from the outside than from inside.

© Lisa Di Donato, from the series "Untitled House Study"

© Lisa Di Donato, from the series "Untitled House Study"

Another note catches my attention. It's an almost alchemical aspect of her practice, which emerges from the intersection of different techniques and ingredients such as expired rolls, analogical pieces of equipment, chemistry. There is a manifestation of a desire to introduce possibilities into the process, a kind of organicism. I almost read in it a need to humanize the technique through the praise of error. Lisa uses the term "compromised chemistry" to predict a loss of expectation and control over the process. Almost as if the trial served as a way out of a conclusive and dystopian approach. Things are not that stable, especially in perception. Life grows around cracks, like weeds on sidewalks. There is the plan and then what actually happens.

© Lisa Di Donato, "Shoot Set" (Wet Plate Process backstage)

© Lisa Di Donato, "Ground Glass" (Wet Plate Process backstage)

© Lisa Di Donato, "Rinsing Tintype" (Wet Plate Process backstage)

Understanding art as a conversation perhaps allows us to nurture a more critical reflection. But it also enables Lisa to cannibalize apparent "failed" or "unsuccessful" works, as if it were essential to shuffle cards every now and then. That's what allows Lisa to be in and out of the scene, thus profiting of additional margin of freedom, of possibility. As in the series "Voci fuori campo" ("Voices out of the field"), which develops "failed" images of New York City's small urban gardens, where overexposure or insufficient chemistry resulted in material corrosion and the value of the photograph as a visual record of a time and place.  I ask myself: does this broader perspective become indispensable in a historical moment in which everything visible has somehow been visualized? We live in times when there are more images than there are things. There is a presumption that if you have seen a picture of something, you have an experience or an understanding of it. Although the images do not guarantee this, people are often considered or even judge through their profiles. 

© Lisa Di Donato, from the series "Darkness Above Light Below"

© Lisa Di Donato, from the series "Darkness Above Light Below"

© Lisa Di Donato, from the series "Darkness Above Light Below"

The works of Lisa also try to reveal technology through its infidelity to reality through imperfections. The latest are liminal spaces in which Lisa places herself with her practice to learn herself and show a new perspective to the observer, different, perhaps alien to everyday life. An invitation to reconsider our expectations concerning what we see and what we believe in images. This opportunity is evident in the Ontic Glow series where she reworks mass-media imagery found in Google Earth's 3D ground view. «Photographs collected on "walks" as a digital tourist through surreal, panoramic industrial sites and remote natural spaces generated by algorithms are reproduced in tintypes' tangible materiality». These elements are then transformed and extracted from time through an artificial reconstruction but based on "vintage" techniques. «I work in two formats: single 8 x 10" photographs depicting very vivid moments that are relatively self-contained in their framing and discrete size; then there are larger works comprised of many 5 x 7 "plates tiled together to form imagery that is dynamic in its tectonic nature. Assembling large images from anywhere from 9 to up to 20 smaller plates, with the longest dimension measuring up to 35-½ ", allows for experimentation with open-ended aspect ratios, befitting my subject matter of an endless panorama of information.» As I read Lisa's description of her method I grasp more and more those essential characteristics of her practice, such as the accentuated manual skills and an eclectic use of techniques.

© Lisa Di Donato, "Ontic Glow #23, 2020 (nine 5 x 7” tintypes)

© Lisa Di Donato, "Ontic Glow #26, 2020 (twenty 5 x 7” tintypes)

© Lisa Di Donato, "Ontic Glow #16, 2020 (8 x 10” tintype)

The importance of asking questions. I also talked about this with Lisa. If search engines offer all the answers today, do we still need to raise our hands? For those who are not digital natives, all of this is obvious. But for how long will we believe that not everything is available on the internet? That not all images are authentic. Unfortunately, the rate of change got so rapid that it makes the whole matter of discussion, here, unnecessary. So then art production, like that of Lisa, which may appear ephemeral to distracted observers, conversely determines a space for meditation. Speaking of the Poladrawing series, Lisa told me about an articulated process of overlapping and intersecting levels and levels that gave her first of all time to think. Once again, what I read in the statement has become clear to me. «Combing the abstractive/ subtractive photographic process and the additive drawing process, the Poladrawings are a reformation of the light that destroyed the initial image, meditations on the nature of retinal and mental images, and explore the relationship of the image to external and internal realities. Atmospheric and at times, hallucinatory, the photographs are no longer of places captured as a singular moment in time but are passages between positions through time.» Likewise with the series In The Garden incidental forms arise from corroded film stock scanned, enlarged and printed onto large sheets of mylar. «[...] the result of chance and choice, at times possessing elements expressive of the places they fleetingly captured or they may be entirely non-referential, evoking anatomies and metaphysical topographies.» My impression is that behind these constructions, these altered visions of built environments, there is a very conscious vision aiming to deconstruct the common language and to manifest its uncertainties and fragility.

© Lisa Di Donato, "In The Garden" (mylar #9)

© Lisa Di Donato, "In The Garden" (mylar #10)

© Lisa Di Donato, "In The Garden" (mylar #5)

I realize that the dialogue with Lisa pushed me in and out of her practice. She has used with me the same approach she takes when making art. Allowing me to observe her work from a distance that created a space, freedom of interpretation. And this is now leading me to end this text with a question. And if art were a place of observation? Like standing on the roof of a building that allows you to watch what is happening around the city, you, and the environment. And to observe it, still feeling somehow, or at least for a brief moment, safe.

LINKS
Lisa Di Donato (website)