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7/12/2005

Elisa Sighicelli

Cohan and Leslie, New York

We are pleased to announce our second exhibition of work by Elisa Sighicelli, who is based in both London and Turin.

In developing a unique method of exhibiting her photographs on aluminum light boxes, Sighicelli constructs works that are at once photographs and architectural objects. By masking out (via hand-painting) portions of the photograph's reverse before it is placed on its support, the artist carefully chooses the area of illumination, thus manipulating her main subject: light. This practice remarks on the nature of photography: while a photograph is fixed moment arrested in time, the unique engagement of light in Sighicelli's work keeps the photographic instant continually present and alive.

With this new exhibition, Elisa Sighicelli will exhibit a new body of work entitled Sottovoce. Each image in this series is a detail taken from a XV & XVI century Sienese painting, including fragments of landscape, seascape and architecture. Sighicelli plays with the scale and perspective of each painting, while exploring the dialogue between luminosity and opacity, foreground and background, solid and void. Through a process of photographic framing and cropping, the artist focuses on the "background" of the paintings, choosing to make central what was at the time incidental to the religious figures and symbols that occupy the foreground of the pictorial space.

Also included in the exhibition are multi-part works of various interiors (an office, a bedroom, an opera house) that explore the stillness and emptiness of commerce and leisure. Through a typology of furniture, these works comment on the profound ordinariness of every day objects and places, and the attendant sense of alienation, ambiguity and anxiety.

Sighicelli will also show a new 16 mm film entitled Baudelaire, which documents the changing light patterns created by a Carlo Mollino-designed chandelier in the Turin Opera House. The looped film shifts from a quiet black void into a cacophonous blanket of white lights, and then suddenly goes black once again. The film touches on the possibilities of transformation of every day, real detail into fantastical occurrence.

Elisa Sighicelli has exhibited her work in various public institutions including the PAC Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan, FACT, Liverpool, Muse'e des Beaux Arts, Tourcoing, and the DA2, Domus Atrium, Salamanca. The artist has had solo exhibitions in London, Paris and Los Angeles. Her most recent project was a one-person exhibition at the Palazzo delle Papesse/Centro Arte Contemporanea in Siena, Italy.

Opening Thursday, December 8, 2005

Cohan and Leslie
138 Tenth Avenue New York, New York 10011 (between 18th and 19th Streets)
Tuesday through Saturday from 10 to 6pm.

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