I visited Caroline’s exhibition at The Brick Lane Gallery yesterday and thought I’d make a quick post about this amazing double exhibition of her last two projects, since the display will only be up for a short period, this weekend! At the front of the gallery, her recent work titled Tropical Sighs is a series of photographs taken through greenhouse glass of tropical plants. The works are all printed on art paper and appears painterly. The dirt and condensation from the internal surfaces of the glasshouse add layers of vibrant texture to the plant studies and gives them a unique look. Read her statement here . I was also intrigued by the way she boxed framed all her prints in clear perspex, perhaps creating another second ‘equilibrium-environment’ which has already been subjected to the living plants via the greenhouse.
The back of the gallery displays her earlier project titled We Are Here. This is a conceptual portraiture series depicting headshots in black and white of settled refugees from a small village in Calabria, Italy called Riace, where the town mayor, one Domenico Lucano, in 1999, welcomed the arriving Kurdish migrants off a boat. He managed to house them in the many empty homes in his shrinking village and through his ingenuity, persuaded the home owners to sell their properties to him for the purpose of providing migrant housing, to this day, is one of the success stories in the larger refugee crisis.
The portraits are all displayed, once again with the use of a transparent perspex layer of an enlarged fingerprint in front of the person – to symbolise giving back identities to what is often, faceless and stateless refugees, since we know that no two fingerprints are ever alike, and every print (and face) is a person of uniqueness.
Powerful stuff.
Caroline Gavazzi is a French/ Italian photographer who lived in London for over 20 years and currently resides between Milan and London.
Caroline presented a Slide Share talk at LightGallery in 2013 and since then, she worked at Spéos Photography School in London. She has Masters in Professional Photography Practice from LCC and also studied photography at Spéos in Paris.
Current Exhibition
Tropical Sighs & We Are Here
5 – 10 July, 2017 Daily 10 – 6pm
The Brick Lane Gallery, 216 Brick Ln, London E1 6SB
More Featured Artists here
explorenation.net ~ photography posts, workshops, writings and thoughts by Steven V-L Lee 
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