Karin Giusti
Honorem: Three Seasons at Black Forest Farm, 2015
Smack Mellon, NY
My role: Curator / Exhibition Designer / Production Director
Karin Giusti’s installation Honorem: Three Seasons at Black Forest Farm addresses the emotions of grief and mourning in the public and private sphere. Using sculpture and photography, Giusti captures memories of her life at a remote farmhouse with her late partner Stephen G. Schwarz, a firefighter and 9/11 First Responder. Giusti’s method of photographing the site in the round creates an enclosed space not meant for living organisms, but rather for memories alone. The digitally stitched photographs are constructed into kaleidoscopic pillars lit from within; transforming Smack Mellon’s existing columns into rows of glowing sentinels, majestically standing guard within the darkened gallery.
Karin Giusti was born in Michigan. She currently lives and works in Upstate New York. Giusti holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University School of Art in New Haven, CT and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from University of Massachusetts at Amherst. For the past twenty years she has been a professor at City University of New York at Brooklyn College. Giusti has exhibited her artwork locally, nationally, and internationally in museums, galleries, and public spaces. She has also lectured on the subject of site-specific sculpture widely, including at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC. Her awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Sculpture Installation from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; Fellowship in Architecture/Environmental Structures from the New York Foundation for the Arts; Individual Artist Grant from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation; the academic award of Bernard H. Stern Professor in Humor; Individual Artist Fellowship for Sculpture from the State of Connecticut Commission on the Arts.
More info about the exhibition on Smack Mellon website.
Image courtesy of the artist and Smack Mellon. Photo by Etienne Frossard.