Visiting Artist Presentation
Monday, October 9, 2017, 4:00pm
Storrs Campus, Art Building, Arena Gallery
Rita Lombardi received her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and her MFA from The University of Connecticut. She has been the recipient of grants and scholarships, including a travel grant from the University of Connecticut, a travel scholarship from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and the John Renna Arts Scholarship, National Endowment for the Arts. She was an artist in residence at the School of Visual Arts in NY and at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, CT.
Lombardi currently resides in central New York state where she is Assistant Professor of Photography at Pratt Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries nationally; in Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Louisville, and throughout New England. She has been published in both print and online publications, including F-Stop Magazine, Afield Magazine, Redivider Literary Journal, and Blank Canvas Magazine. Her photographs can be found in various private collections.
Rita Lombardi: Artist Statement
I am endlessly curious about life and the motivations that guide us. It is through observing and picturing the world around me that I come to an understanding of it. I use a variety of materials and instruments within photography to come to these visual understandings. I have involved printmaking, repetition and chance, high-end digital and old-school antique processes, and every format of film camera from 35mm to 8×10. For me, it isn’t so much about what I am using, as it is about what it is I am making and how that relates to what I have used to make it; a symbiotic process of cause and effect.
I am currently, as I often do, working on multiple “projects”. In On Libraries, I am picturing the present usage of community libraries, acknowledging their rich history and striving to see them as a vital part of the future despite their complex and changing current role. With Liminal Umbra I explore abstraction in a photographic artifact, the glass negative.
I find that the best way to answer my own questions is to make things until I understand. I recall the voice of a grade school teacher saying “the only stupid question is the one you don’t ask.” Put more succinctly by Alice Walker, “So much of the satisfying work of life begins as an experiment; having learned this, no experiment is ever quite a failure.”