Luca Soldovieri

Now That The Dust Has Settled

September 9, 2023 – October 6, 2023

Luca Soldovieri

Now That The Dust Has Settled

September 9 – October 6, 2023

Artist Talk: Saturday September 30, at 2pm

We are pleased to present Luca Soldovieri’s first solo exhibition at the Olga Korper Gallery.

About Long Lost Jewelry:

A contemporary explorer, Luca first goes hunting in the Lost and Found, gathering at TTC asset-recovery auctions, collecting strangers’ lost pieces of jewelry. Slowly, slowly, each piece is ground to dust by hand before being applied to paper in ‘drawing’ form, each drawing a portrait of the item from its own dust. Four rings, a watch, and a locket are reduced to fine particles and remade again in their own image, like small ghosts. The cyclical nature of each work references versions of self, memory, and how it feels to put oneself back together. To be found and made new again.

About Correspondences:

A series of ten correspondences from the artist’s own life and relationships are, in a breezeless room, sanded by hand into dust. Impossible to reassemble, each postcard and page is carefully gathered and reformed into a square as an abstract shadow of its former shape. Love letters, goodbyes, birthday cards, and apologies form a row of pale, uniform works with only subtle variations. The creases in the pages and impressions from ballpoint pens have all disappeared, but where does the love in a love letter go? Where are the wishes, best, well, or otherwise? These pieces possess the curious quality of being both there, and not there. The molecules of the original objects are the same, and so are their histories, and yet they are forever changed. This is the experience of loss and remembering: to feel the friction between what was and what is.

About Dust Paintings:

Household dust is a material charged with physical traces of history, time, home, and self. It’s composed of the matter of its surroundings – of bodies, structures, and belongings – forged by the friction between them. It has connotations of both intimacy and shame, naturalness and neglect. It is an omnipresent, entirely universal substance and a consequence of our movement through time. In a body of work Luca unofficially refers to as ‘dust paintings,’ household dust becomes a visual language to explore experiences which are equally as personal, imperfect, and mysterious as the dust itself.

Dust collected over multiple years from spaces frequented by the artist is systematically and painstakingly layered on board to build images of windows and locks. Whether the artist/viewer is positioned on the inside or outside often remains ambiguous (does the light shine in? Or out?). The window becomes a location in and of itself; for waiting, watching. The lock a location of meeting and longing. These entryways and exit points reference the strange intimacy of relating to the exterior world from the interior of a room or a consciousness, of looking out from behind your own eyes into someone else. One particular series of dust paintings, Bound by the Light, depicts an existing set of window where Luca has reconfigured the cast light to an impossible shared direction. For this one moment, in this one exhibition, they share an invisible and almost supernatural light source. As though, as they are divided by time and space, they will always be bound by some dimension unknown to all but the artist herself.

Soldovieri’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, Now That The Dust Has Settled, makes good on the idiom of stillness after upheaval. During this settling one might, even if just for a moment, see glimpses of the present more clearly: of what has been lost and learned, and everything that still remains. Experiences will come and go, light will shift, letters discarded, jewelry lost, but over a lifetime there will always be the wonderful constance of dust collected on a windowsill.