Work in Progress with Interpretative Texts by Visitors of Novarese's Artist Talk

ONE SHOT
Irina Novarese

EXHIBITION November  11 - January 20, 2018
PARTICIPATIVE ARTIST TALK Friday, October 27, 7PM


Introducing Helen, Elizabeth, Esther, and Anna, the women of the All Female Survey Crew photographed in 1918 during the Minidoka Infrastructure Project. Their newly formed identities and recalculated life stories are made available by archeologist, historian, editor, narrator artist Irina Novarese in ONE SHOT, an exhibition of 'real facts and real fictions.'

A month spent uncovering identities, negotiating with archivists, and being on location in Minidoka, left Novarese swimming in a sea of newspaper articles, images, and relics of a time passed. Her own impressions of times then combined with her research now brought Novarese to a point of incarnation; standing where they stood in the field surveying the land. The Boise public had a lot to say about the piles of references Novarese presented them on women's role in society and local political history. Through a puzzling together of the numerous and varied blocks of history and association the legends of women have been reborn. Their voices, in a numerical perpetual canon have returned to the field where they were captured on film 100 years ago.

From found imagery and artifacts, Irina Novarese (Turin, IT) constructs spaces identified by fiction and reality. She recreates histories based on input shared by the community, archival information, on-site research and personal interpretation. Novarese's installations become a type of abstract storytelling that brings into question how we perceive and personify history, its relics, and those who preserve it.

The origin of Novarese' site- specific, solo exhibition ONE SHOT is an investigation into an image sourced from U.S. Bureau of Reclamation entitled All Female Survey Crew taken in 1918, during the Minidoka Project. The picture is the only one available that documents a completely female survey crew until the 1950s. 

irinanovarese.de

This project & cultural exchange was made possible thanks to the generous support of the Boise City Department of Arts & History.