Exhibit: Kathleen Lugosch “Seeing Place”

MONDAY – FRIDAY 9 a.m. – 4 p.m.

Experience of place holds my interest as architect, academic, and artist.
The through line: art – architecture – place.

My education: undergraduate major in fine arts, followed by a Master of Architecture. Art to architecture; one leads to and is embedded in the other. Both offer opportunities to see, to understand, to interpret what is seen, to speak, and to create.

This show, divided into five moments, intimates deep kinship and feelings of responsibility, love, and joy with place, this forest, I call home. Impressions, photos, maps, emotion, memory . . . ways of seeing that I explore through this exhibit.

Threshold:
Atkins Reservoir, the gateway to my forest world.
Beneath My Feet:
These prints are an expression of a complex, emotional response to forest images. Using Photoshop, I dig through layers found within photographs. Some layers are highlighted, enhanced, given prominence. Others, subdued. The prints, aligned with personal experience, are the result of a search for essence.
See Me:
Homage to endangered and extinct species. Habitat destruction, fragmentation, climate change, invasive species…, all contribute to this loss. Mass Wildlife’s Natural Heritage and Endangered Species Program has identified 224 endangered species. The Southeastern Mass Pine Barrens Alliance has identified 46 extirpated or extinct species. In our state.
Forest Topophotos:
Topographical maps, two-dimensional abstractions representing land’s three-dimensional surface. Photographs, that capture an instant, taking that moment out of existence into abstraction. Forest Topophotos is a dialogue between distinct abstractions of place. The resulting images are printed on translucent material to introduce a third abstraction, the linkage of printed images with glimpses of the current moment existing beyond the print.
Portraits:
Portrait: “an artform that tells a person’s history” (National Gallery of Ireland). Portraits in this exhibit, of singular elements, convey their personal history at a moment in time.

And Thanks:
To Stan Sherer for his enthusiastic support and expertise, Sandy Litchfield for initiating this show, to Julie Lapping Rivera, Nancy Campbell, and Sigrid Miller Pollin, for critical insights, and, of course, to Mike Williams.
Contact: Lugosch@umass.edu