The Secret Garden
© Stephanie GengottiCurated by Pamela Piscicelli / D.O.O.R.
The choice of telling one’s story to a stranger for a whole year, relying on photography as an exploratory and introspective means.
The definition of an existential measuring unit or simply a symbolic boundary: one year.
But time is misleading, Augustine of Hippo argued: “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”
So pictures come in a succession along a seemingly linear path, albeit fragmented. Memories and reality trigger an overlapping dance where everything becomes undefined and the only possible space takes on the shape of a dreamlike dimension. The lost or rediscovered love, atavistic fears, maternity awareness, second chances to change what life had left suspended. Emotionally everything is impressed, visually what appears to be left out has become a metaphor in the cathartic relationship with nature. The cognitive process of the self changes its course, and from the accumulation of images, it switches to their subtraction which grasps the sense of all. Finding oneself, finding a balance whatever the challenges are, reconnecting to one’s own interior garden, to the primordial energy which reminds us how we inevitably belong to this thing called Universe.
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InstituteTM (collectively Institute Pictures, Institute Studios, & Institute Artist) is redefining how stories are produced and told in the 21st Century. Founded by Producer Frank Evers and Director/Visual Artist Lauren Greenfield, we are a multiplatform production company representing auteur-driven storytellers across commercials, photography, fine art, film, and technology — and producing original work across every screen that those stories live on. Our multiplatform expertise and established global relationships in entertainment, commercial, fine art, and journalism create unmatched reach and cross-pollination of creative work. A film commission informs a photography campaign; a fine art practice shapes a commercial; an editorial relationship opens a documentary. Few companies operate fluently across all of these worlds. Institute was built this way from the ground up.
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