Friday, July 1, Elegy, Samantha DiRosa's latest project, which combines several disparate artworks into one cohesive installation, will open at Living Arts in downtown Tulsa.
In Elegy, DiRosa brings together fragments of several diverse bodies of work created over the last five years (Mapping Meg Ryan, 37.421467˚, and Elegies from the Medical Terminology Study Card Set). From these bodies of work, and included in the exhibition, are re-photographed sequences of somewhat awkward gestures from Meg Ryan films, appropriated video and re-worked scripts from threshold moments of these films, photographs and writings from my pilgrimage to the California coast (the same latitude as Fukushima, Japan), broadcast stills of the Fukushima disaster, and finally, medical flash cards with burned-out lines of text, contained within glass and displayed sentimentally as if on mantels. In these seemingly disparate pieces tensions exist between reality and fantasy, presence and invisibility, and hope and despair. Like a stutter—or series of stutters–the mind jumps around and emotional states are in flux. Elegy utilizes a structure of visual haikus (the symbolism embedded in the number three intentional), in attempt to bring poetic form to these stutters––to bring order to randomness, and to resolve the absurd alongside the momentous. The exhibit runs through July 22. http://livingarts.org/elegy 