Video: Venice - The
National Museum of Archaeology – Lynn Davis - Modern Views of Ancient Treasures - Photographs of ancient sacred
places in the East exhibition. A conversation
between Lynn Davis, Hélène De Franchis and Marco Meneguzzo.
Venice: The National Museum of Archaeology – Lynn
Davis - Modern Views of Ancient
Treasures - Photographs of ancient sacred places in the East exhibition. Lynn Davis is considered one of the most refined
photographers on the American scene. A student of Berenice Abbot, one of
photography's myths, and a friend of Robert Mapplethorpe, the
"maudit" photographer in the New York limelight in the 1980s,
Lynn Davis is showing her works in The National Museum of Archaeology in Venice,
until January 13, with one of her most refined series of large
photographs, all centered on the epiphany of places sacred to humanity:
monumental tombs in the middle of the desert, temples rising up
like stalagmites from the plains, and hieratic figures emerging from the
mountains.
Above: Cemetery Steps, Dunhuang (China # 10), 2001, gelatin silver print, toned with sepia and selenium.
Above: Cemetery Steps, Dunhuang (China # 10), 2001, gelatin silver print, toned with sepia and selenium.
Lynn Davis - Modern Views of Ancient Treasures - Photographs of ancient sacred
places in the East exhibition. These are
the images that the photographer prefers today in her constant search for
a place "outside time", one that can transmit to humanity, today
as much as yesterday, a sense of the absolute.
Because of this, to exhibit in
this archaeological museum has a double significance as the photos do not
simply enter into a relationship with the spectators' eyes, but they also
relate with the remains conserved in the museum. These, ideally, are part
of Lynn Davis's interests, both as objects in themselves, often they are
funeral monuments with celebrative statuary, and as memory-objects of the
far-sighted collectors who, beginning with the Renaissance
priests Domenico and Giovanni Grimani in the sixteenth century,
contributed to the collection of antiques
in the Venice Archaeological Museum.
And so Lynn Davis's ideal and physical journey has finally found its perfect
setting: a setting of memories; antique, ancestral, almost atavistic, where
these large, scale photographs, magisterially printed on rare photographic
paper, become, not simply one of the season's exhibitions, but the place
where they "have always been" and where, ideally, they could remain
for ever.
Above: Ancient City of Gaochang, Buddhist temple, Turpan (China # 20), 2001, gelatin silver print, toned with sepia and
selenium.
Concept by Elena Povellato, in collaboration
with the Galerie Karsten. The exhibition is curated by Marco Meneguzzo.
