David (scout) McQueen "Adrift in your ocean, trying to find my way…"
Wayfarers
This event has ended.
“There are stories we need to remember, stories we wish to forget, and stories we are meant to imagine.”
-V. Gamba (1649)
I have a friend who often dreams of sculpture. In her dreams, there are amazingly inventive objects and sprawling installations that do all of the things she hopes her own work can do. When she wakes, she is filled with both jealousy and this specific sadness that she wasn’t the artist to bring these beauties into the world. But as her conscious mind finds the day and re-orders the events of the previous night’s wanderings, she realizes that those perfectly imperfect objects belong to her, she has only to tease them out of her dream and into the physical world. This is how I felt when I learned of Vincenzo Gamba.
Vincenzo Gamba was the illegitimate son of Galileo Galilei (who did in fact legitimize him in 1619), and for the most part, he followed in his father’s pursuits both with mechanics and the lute. But Vincenzo was also particularly a gifted poet and applied a more metaphorical sensibility to his mechanical studies. While every son must at some point escape his father’s shadow, it is no monumental observation that some fathers cast longer shadows than others. As such, Vincenzo’s work is largely lost, and only by the fickleness of chance (or providence?) did I learn of his existence at all.
During the summer of 2012, wandering the side streets of Florence, hoping for some actual little treasure amongst the tourist-driven street vendors, I bought eight copper plates that were so badly worn that the only decipherable image was what seemed to be a telescope. The text was unreadable (to me) as it was:
a. hidden by a patina that seemed centuries old
b. backwards and
c. in Italian.
But treasure in hand, I returned to my work and eventually my country. Only months later was I able to polish, print, and have translated the snippets of text that remained. The plates revealed the story of a man who seemed equal parts scientist and poet. The image was not, as it turns out, a telescope, but a tool for decision making. In fact, all of the drawings were based on navigational instruments, but each had been reconfigured for emotional rather than nautical purposes. The salvageable text appeared to be the chronicle of an affair - illicit, unrequited, awful... and utterly enchanting. The tools had been imagined as a way to find a path through that complicated emotional landscape.
The sculptures in this show are, I hope, faithful to Vincenzo’s drawings. For every mention of his lover, there is a boat floating in the center of the gallery. Some are lovelier than others, some more finished, some more raw, some more broken. But each is true to the tone of the text, and I hope that in combination there is a path, or at least a direction.
Media
Schedule
from January 06, 2013 to February 17, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-01-06 from 18:00 to 21:00