Sites of Memory and Honor
March 13 – April 17, 2004
 
Opening Reception:  March 13, 2004

Frozen Glory
An illustrated lecture by documentary filmmaker
Patti Cassidy
Thursday April 15, 2004, 7:30 pm.

Don't forget to visit....

calendar

site map

archive

artist's statement and
more images for this exhibition

The exhibit presents the work of 4 photographers whose work is concerned with memory, memorialization and the representation of absence. The work of these photographers includes images of cemeteries, shrines, roadside memorials and monuments. These sites create a sacred space, name and honor individuals, and mark the past. They are moving in their universality and fascinating in their cultural specificity.

Sylvia de Swann lives in Utica, NY and teaches at Hamilton College in Clinton NY. De Swann is a Roumanian-born Jew who was uprooted and displaced by WWII. She is interested in the layers of history that coexist in the present. Shortly after the fall of communism she embarked on a project entitled "Return" to explore the almost forgotten terrain of her early childhood. The first part uses a train journey through Eastern Europe as a framework to meditate on memory, identity, exile and roots. Part II, "Memorabilia" is about the relics of the past that linger on our contemporary landscape. She combines photographs of memorials and shrines with short journal-like texts to position herself before these monuments and to contextualize her personal story within the larger sweeps of history.

Iris Falck Donnelly  is drawn to cemeteries both as a refuge from the din of urban life, and as a way to make contact with a culture. Donnelly has photographed in Guatemala, Ireland and France.

Dietrich Christian Lammerts  presently lives in Ithaca, NY. Lammerts will exhibit 10 photographs from a larger body of work of photographs of the graves of 150 people who have helped shape modern culture in the West. This project was carried out in collaboration with the humanities scholar and author Mark C. Taylor. The photographs were published in Taylor’s book Grave Matters, and were first exhibited at MASS Moca, in North Adams, Massachusetts in November 2002.

Patti Cassidy is a writer/documentary maker who specializes in public sculpture. She has lived and worked in Tucson, Boston and is now living in Jamestown, Rhode Island, where she is working on a new documentary about war memorials. Her description of her lecture, Frozen Glory follows:

“When battles are over and the din of guns and drums subside, glory is frozen. Grieving survivors raise stone and bronze monuments to honor their dead. FROZEN GLORY explores the history of these monuments in Rhode Island and the times and generations that surrounded them. In my talk, I will explore some of the themes of these memorials and question how and if they work to combat the heartbreaking amnesia that follows wars after a few generations.” Dietrich Christian Lammerts, Here Lies Van Gogh This exhibition is supported in part by the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and The Hera Educational Foundation. Hera Gallery is handicapped accessible.

Back to top

The following artist’s statement by Alexandra Broches, speaks to her own work as well as to the ideas behind the exhibition as a whole.
                                                                                       – Cynthia Farnell, Director, Hera Gallery

Alexandra Broches' Statement

Many of us take cemeteries and burial practices for granted, or are unable to think about death until we are confronted with it in our own lives. Much of my interest stems no doubt from personal experience, but I did not see this connection when I began to photograph cemeteries on my first trip to Hawaii in the mid-80s.

I was then, and continue to be, fascinated by the ways in which cemeteries reflect history, cultural practices, and religious beliefs of a particular group or place and what they tell us about the society that has created them.
Detail from installation of photographs by Alexandra Broches

I first exhibited some of the images represented in this installation at Hera Gallery in 1997. Since then I have continued this investigation while undertaking other photographic projects as well. In addition to photographs taken in Hawaii, France and the US, I have added images from Israel, Egypt, Holland, England and Cuba. In recent years I became interested in roadside memorials and the expressions of grief and memorialization that occur after traumatic and tragic events such as Princess Diana’s death, September 11 and here in Rhode Island, the Station Club Fire. The offerings and mementos left daily at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington have presented us with questions about how to deal with these expressions. These items, for instance, are collected, catalogued and archived in a storage facility maintained by the Park Service.

Photograph by Iris Falck Donnelly

The photographs taken in Hawaii are of late 19th and early 20th century graves of Japanese plantation workers and their families, Chinese and Japanese headstones in a modern cemetery (remains are sometimes reburied in newly established cemeteries), and of native Hawaiian gravesites encountered alongside the road. The latter seem to be sites similar to family burial grounds found in Rhode Island that are not associated with a church or established cemetery association.

	Detail from installation of photographs by Alexandra Broches
	European cemeteries of the late 19th century were the repository of large quantities of outdoor sculpture and funerary architecture until the establishment of museums, which provided a more accessible and protected environment for the display of fine art. Some interesting examples are seen in the rather Baroque portrait sculptures from Nice.

Italian stone carvers who immigrated to the US to work in the quarries in Vermont and Rhode Island brought these skills and style with them. Photographs began to take the place of portrait sculptures in funerary art and we see the placement of daguerreotypes and later ceramicized portraits or markers in provincial French cemeteries. Etching in stone and other pictorial methods have been developed in modern times.

In Cuba I visited the cemetery of the Chinese (Christian) community and the village cemetery of Viñales, as well as the European (Spanish) influenced Cementario de Colòn.

Photographs and text by Sylvia de Swaan

Gettysburg National Cemetery, modeled on the garden cemetery of the 19th century, was dedicated November 19, 1863 at the site of the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. More than 50,000 Union and Confederate soldiers lost their lives in the three-day battle. The park contains other monuments dedicated to units of soldiers who fought there. Although monuments and memorials are often not located at the place of burial, many cemeteries contain war memorials.

Photographs by Dietrich Christian Lammerts

The cemetery in West Brompton in London provides us with a model for the garden cemetery movement in America. The cemeteries of the garden or rural cemetery movement such as Swan Point in Providence and Mount Auburn in Cambridge are the first large public spaces in America. They are the precursors of public parks such as Central Park and Roger Williams Park in Providence.

Many cemeteries in the US today have strict rules about types and sizes of markers and do not permit individual expressions of mourning and commemoration. Flowers and mementoes are quickly removed. Ease of grounds maintenance is of primary concern. In contemporary society interest in visiting the cemetery has waned. Many people live far away from their families or hometowns and may never visit the grave again after the internment. People find other ways to memorialize the dead as cemeteries become less interesting or peaceful places to visit. While retaining the ideal of the cemetery as a beautiful place where the dead are at peace and are reconciled with nature, garden parks, with their memorial tablets flush to the ground, seem characterless and prevent families from mourning and expressing their grief in unique and meaningful ways.

Back to top