{"id":1567,"date":"2023-03-22T21:40:26","date_gmt":"2023-03-22T21:40:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/?p=1567"},"modified":"2023-10-23T22:02:45","modified_gmt":"2023-10-23T22:02:45","slug":"on-images","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/2023\/03\/22\/on-images\/","title":{"rendered":"On Images\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Photo credit: Kimi Takesue<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Vesna Pavlovi\u0107<\/strong>\u00a0is a 2022-2023 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year\u2019s group is exploring the theme of \u201cMending and Transforming.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Images have taken an unprecedented role in our lives. Vast amounts of existing and newly taken photographs, found and computer-generated, are widely and instantaneously disseminated through social media platforms<\/span>. My photography challenges these conditions by exploring the traditional repositories such as archives, often suspended, forgotten, and in danger of disappearance. I am motivated by the urgency of the current state of the photographic medium and the newly formed \u2018aura\u2019 that <\/span>images gain in this era. In this newly expanded field, perception is in continuous evolution.<\/span><\/p>\n

Art has a powerful role to play in creating a safe place to talk about the memory, place, and violent erasure, in order to imagine a more equitable and just future. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hal Foster writes about the artists who \u201cwant to push the futuristic freedoms of new media, and others who want to look at what this apparent leap forward opens up in the past, the obsolete.\u201d I locate myself in this latter area of artistic examination, as I consider the objects of the past, treating them in an innovative, and digital way. Throughout my career, my photographs and artwork have addressed several important issues and questions in contemporary art, including: new modes of documentary photography, photography’s expanded field, visual translation of historical archives, the relationship of photography to film, and the omnipresence of images in contemporary culture.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My research project, <\/span>The Woven Wind <\/span><\/i>developed as a series of artistic interventions within the historic archive of the University of the South, Sewanee\u2019s Special Collection Library. <\/span>This <\/span>multi-layered, multi-year research project <\/span>is a<\/span> platform for education, conversation, empathy, and healing. It aims at reconciling and reconsidering the history of slavery, trauma, and loss. <\/span>In 2018, I joined the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation group at the Sewanee, University of the South, a six-year initiative investigating the university\u2019s historical entanglements with slavery and slavery\u2019s legacies. I was invited to work with history students to visually translate the recently discovered <\/span>archival findings of <\/span>pre- and post-Civil War history tied to the Sewanee\u2019s storied Lovell-Quitman family. <\/span><\/p>\n

These papers, including extensive plantation records and documents from the Lovells\u2019 service in the Confederate military, came to the university\u2019s archives through an association with William Storrow Lovell and his wife, Antonia, who was the daughter of John A. Quitman (1799-1858), a large slaveholder and one-time governor of Mississippi. <\/span>I consider the Lovell-Quitman archive a site of painful memory and erasure. In a moment of historical reckoning in American society and globally, this project has a special charge for me. Art has a powerful role to play in creating a safe place to talk about the memory, place, and violent erasure, in order to imagine a more equitable and just future. <\/span>The complexity of representing the enslaved remains at the core of the project. How to ethically amplify the voices of the enslaved, and their visibility?\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In this project, I collaborate with an interdisciplinary team including artists Courtney Adair Johnson and Marlos E\u2019van, M\u00e9lisande Short-Colomb, community advocate at Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown, musician Rod McGaha, genealogist Jan Hillegas, and Woody Register, director of the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation University of the South, Sewanee.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Vesna Pavlovi\u0107<\/strong> (MFA Visual Arts, Columbia University 2007) is recipient of 2022 TAC Arts Access Grant, 2021 Current Art Fund Grant, 2020 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Fulbright Scholar Award in 2018, and George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation grant in 2017. She exhibited widely including Phillips Collection in Washington DC, Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville, the Untitled, 12th Istanbul Biennial, 2011, Turkey; MAC \u2013 Metropolitan Arts Center in Belfast, Northern Ireland, W\u00fcrttembergischen Kunstverein, D\u00fcsseldorf, Germany, among others.\u00a0Her work is included in major private and public art collections, including Phillips Collection, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Museum of Women in the Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia.\u00a0Recent publications include\u00a0<\/em>Vesna Pavlovi\u0107, Stagecraft\u00a0(Vanderbilt University Press, 2021) and\u00a0<\/em>Vesna Pavlovi\u0107\u2019s Lost Art: Photography, Display, and the Archive\u00a0(Hanes Art Gallery, Wake Forest University, 2018).<\/em><\/p>\n

Website: <\/b>https:\/\/www.vesna-pavlovic.com\/ <\/a>Instagram: <\/b>@studio_vesnapavlovic\u00a0 Twitter: <\/b>@artistvesna<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vesna Pavlovi\u0107\u00a0is a 2022-2023 RPW Center Faculty Fellow. This year\u2019s group is exploring the theme of \u201cMending and Transforming.\u201d Images have taken an unprecedented role in our lives. Vast amounts of existing and newly taken photographs, found and computer-generated, are widely and instantaneously disseminated through social media platforms. My photography challenges these conditions by exploring…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":2336,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[16,18,21],"tags":[12],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/vu-cas\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2023\/03\/23220241\/blmanuscripts9.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1567"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/60"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1567"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1569,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1567\/revisions\/1569"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/robert-penn-warren-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}