LigoranoReese's Vanishing Finish opens in EXiT at Catharine Clark Gallery on Saturday, November 8, from 3–5PM. Vanishing Finish is traveling to EXiT from the University of Wyoming. The exhibition is presented in conversation with Borrowed Time; both bodies of work take a closer look at the precarity of the environment and seek to visualize anxieties around the global climate and the ephemeral yet resilient qualities of nature.
Vanishing Finish is a series of 49 cyanotype prints of endangered keystone species from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List. Keystone species are land animals, insects, sea life, plants and bacteria at the apex of their habitat and ecological community. Their loss decimates the ecosystem.
Cyanotype is a light sensitive photographic contact print process that like most photographs fade in direct sunlight. But unlike faded photographs, cyanotypes return to their original state after being placed in a dark environment. We chose to work with this process, because of its restorative powers.
Vanishing Finish is inspired by Ligorano’s ongoing conservation treatments of the Brooklyn Bridge blueprints and the 2018 New York Public Library exhibition Blue Prints: the Pioneering Photographs of Anna Atkins.
The artistic process combines digital and handmade processes. The first step is to coat a sheet of 30 gram Sekishu Japanese tissue with cyanotype solution. The tissue results in a translucent, ephemeral image, possessing an airlike quality.
The images are sourced primarily from 19th century illustrations in the Smithsonian’s Biodiversity Heritage Library. Digital negatives are created from these illustrations, exposed directly onto the coated Sekishu paper using UV light. Translated to blueprints, they refer to a cultural system and taxonomy invented by Europeans that have become parts of a living architectural system regulated and restricted by economics and environmental laws.
Formal press release forthcoming.
