ORATORIO : trasporto : ascendere 

Leigh Ann Hallberg and Paul Bright’s exhibition is open each evening 6-8pm, May 29-June 5

Special thanks to: dott. Enzo Cavallari, anche Mara Vandelli e Fabrizio Corazza.

Oratorio Marzaiolo 

appears small on the outside, like those miniature representations of churches being presented in medieval and Renaissance Italian paintings. But entering this structure, one is struck by a paradoxically enlarged sense of space, and the feeling of being in a vessel; the way the ceiling structure meets the walls is like the inverted hull of a boat. 

This Oratorio embodies the idea of something that could transport or carry you, and also the idea of it being a portal; both are manifestations of a means to access another realm of experience. 

The experience of 

ORATORIO : trasporto : ascendere 

is based upon kinds of movement: your arrival into the surprising Oratorio interior. The circo-ambulatory movement around the space we invite you to make (as was typical for processions in early church spaces). The movement of your eyes into the colors, patterns and overlapping, shifting spaces of Leigh Ann’s suspended narrow panels. And importantly, moving your eyes up into the space she has altered, from the floor. The sounds in Paul’s collage evoke or are records of movement, and sound itself is the movement of air at different frequencies and intensities. Radiating sound fills the Oratorio in shifting ways, as a resonant vessel and as a mutating sonic space. Sometimes the structure acoustically disappears when the recorded sounds match their sources from the road just the other side of the Oratorio walls.

trasporto : a four-channel sound collage : paul bright

Trasporto is a sound collage evoking possible mechanisms, spaces, and experiences of “transportation” in both a quotidian and a metaphysical context. The collage is composed of many recorded sounds from different places and times, some from the Oratorio itself. “Transport” refers to the carrying of cargo, but also to how we get around by means other than walking, with cars, boats, planes, bicycles, and even spaceships. And of course “transport” is also a state of rapture, ecstacy, of being “carried away” emotionally, spiritually; a word indicating where bodily, sensual, sensuous, and spiritual experiences can meet, collide, and overlap.

 Trasporto is the title of Paul’s work, but it applies to Leigh Ann’s as well. Movement or travel; of the eyes, the senses…bodily; around, across, and up, from one site or state to another.

ascendere : a multi-panel painting installation : leigh ann hallberg

Leigh Ann’s multi-panel installation is clustered towards the northeast corner and emerges into the Oratorio interior. The imagery, nature-based but abstract and often geometric, “ascends” with the verticality of the narrow panels, sometimes from browns and greens to blues, echoing the ceilings of spaces like Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel and the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, but often scrambling the expectation of a transcription of earth-to-heaven, perhaps as an indication of our disordered times. Opposite the windowed walls, sections of applied metal leaf appear dark, disappear, then project as light, defying the fact of their grounding on the panels.