VIEW WORK
About

Isabella Pitisci, was born in 1969 and died in 2013. She began exhibiting work from the very beginning of her photography degree at Camberwell College of Arts in 2004. Her creative career spans a series of solo and group exhibitions that took place in various locations, from the Frieze Art Fair, Morley Gallery, Central Space, The Royal Institution of Great Britain, Flat Time House and Martello St Studios, to The Gallery Ipswich and Bury St Edmonds Art Gallery. Concerned with exploring the phenomenological experience of her viewers, Pitisci’s site-specific installations in Queens Wood, London and St Marys-at-the-Quay, Ipswich are particularly prominent in her creative oeuvre. Recognised for her creative endeavours Pitisci was presented with two separate professional development awards, one funded by the Royal Female School of Art Foundation associated with Morley College, and another from London College of Communication for her Media Design.

Keen to share her experiences and knowledge with others, Pitisci studied a PGCE and began teaching art students at Suffolk School of Arts in 2009, whilst also nurturing her own photography practice.

Isabella Pitisci’s life was cut short by her untimely death in 2013, this website serves to celebrate and memorise her creative excellence.

About her Work

Pitisci worked with a desire to collapse the boundaries between image and object. In a quest for material representation and re-embodiment, her work aimed to exhibit the objectness of both the apparatus of the image, and the image itself.

The material on which the image is printed serves as a symbolic dimension in Pitisci’s work, encouraging us to see the image as an object, Pitisci flooded her images with concepts by experimenting with the positioning of the image and the apparatus in a three-dimensional space. From the physical traces and index of time, scratches and dust, through to the uncanny physical absence of the image itself, her work draws out an images physical connection with the material world.

The work is thematically and formally pensive and self-reflexive. The tropes it explores pertain to the archive, and the form of her work becomes a language describing an idea, or rather, to be truer to the spirit of the work, it is through its very materiality that the work acquires meaning. Pitisci seduces the viewer into a phenomenological experience with the object. The work has a life of its own and the viewer is invited to let the object mirror their sensibility and their own desires. After all, ‘it is the object which thinks us’.

If you wish to know more, please contact Rachida Mokhtari.



mokhtahari@googlemail.com

Maman

(2006-2007)

Taking a digital picture frame and placing it under the critical gaze of an art audience, Pitisci threw the idea of a digital photograph as a non-physical object into question. The exposed 10 meter wire in this installation served to highlight how even the digital image relies on its physical existence, pull the plug and the image dies, here Pitisci challenged what she called the ‘mythical virtuality of images’. In step with Villem Flusser, Pitisci was concerned with how the apparatus of the image, i.e. the camera itself, or the display, contributes to the physicality of the image in symbolic ways.

In Maman, Pitisci found symbolic symmetry between the processes of developing the work and the Coronary Angiograph that forms the content of this installation’s video. The technological terminology used to describe the conjunction of short clips, ‘stitching’, immerses the process in ideas of medical procedures and echoes ‘bodily’ qualities. Moreover, in order for the arteries to be seen, a dye must be added, echoing once again the traditional photographic concept of the latent image, i.e. the image is there, but cannot be seen until revealed by chemical process. Flusser emphasised that ‘the photographer can only want what the program of the camera or what the apparatus wants’, in light of this, Pitisci allowed a rogue program to alter the shape of the image away from her original design, since it was her Mother’s heart in the video, the work is filled with ‘life’. The concepts are wrapped up by the overriding and poignant ‘mortality’ of the image.