"Selections from Pedro Lasch’s 'Phantom Limbs' and 'Twin Towers Go Global'" Exhibition
Stephan Stoyanov Gallery
This event has ended.
Visual artist and Duke University professor Pedro Lasch had been living in New York for more than seven years when the WTC was attacked. He watched speechless in Brooklyn when the second tower tragically came down. Like so many others, he decided during the weeks that followed that he would attempt to translate the collective anger, trauma, and hope for reconciliation into a memorial artwork. Wanting to produce a truly international memorial that would consider 9/11/2001 in relation to other major global events, the concept of rebuilding the Twin Towers in different cities around the world came to him almost immediately. He began working on the project in October 2001, when he read that U.S. soldiers had requested that remnants of the WTC be brought to Kabul, so they could be placed in the middle of the first military camp of ‘Operation Enduring Freedom.’ But Lasch’s memorial was never meant to join the onslaught of projects seen in those first few months and years. Perhaps in contrast with the unintended delays at Ground Zero in New York, the artist conceived of these fictional Twin Tower reconstructions as a work that would intentionally develop over many years, perhaps more than a decade. On the one hand, this would allow people to begin to heal and to develop more nuanced emotional and intellectual responses to the tragedy and its related artwork. On the other hand, in Lasch’s view, time was the only lens through which to see how the event would impact art and culture, global political affairs, and our everyday lives.
Between 2001 and 2005, he researched widely, sketched, and created possible reconstructions through digital simulations. Among other ideas incorporated into the series from this research, Lasch learned that the beams from New York’s Tribute in Light had already reappeared in real life in other cities around the world to commemorate 9/11/2001. During these years, the Manhattan icons were projected onto the skylines of Paris, Liverpool, Budapest, and Montevideo. Beginning in 2006, Lasch incorporated these cities and other sites of global significance in the immediate years after the WTC attacks into elaborate paintings done in different styles associated with the Western canon. The Twin Towers are featured in all twelve paintings that compose the complete series, and are installed in galleries resembling the institutions that house historical works of art. Entitled Phantom Limbs, these works are at once hopeful, critical, and contemplative. They are a caring memorial to those who have died in New York, New Orleans, Baghdad, Kabul, Darfur, and other tragic sites. The selection of six paintings shown at Stephan Stoyanov Gallery is the first public viewing of any of these works in New York and the U.S.
A parallel work produced by Lasch grew out of the research and ideas from the previous memorial. While in 2004 he decided that painting would best encompass the historical and emotional range required, he also knew that social and digital media would best harness the collective imagination needed to consider what it means to picture the Twin Towers rebuilt around the world. In 2006, he began his Twin Towers Go Global (TTGG) project, a complex participatory work which now includes many collaborators, a website, three special anniversary productions for the AND AND AND platform of Documenta 13 in Kassel (2010, 2011, 2012), as well as an international open call to propose host cities for the towers. If you would like to participate in the call, we invite you to visit: http://www.twintowersgoglobal.org/ The appearance of Lasch’s name on the TTGG website is intentionally oblique, as he believes that such signs of single artistic authorship greatly reduce social participation in these kinds of works.
[Image: "WTC Budapest" Oil on canvas 36 x 48 in. from the Phantom Limbs series (2001-2011)]
Media
Schedule
from September 07, 2011 to October 09, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-09-07 from 18:00 to 21:00