IRA LOMBARDIA

Jet Lag

New York, United States • iralombardia.com

  • In the Jet Lag series, in each of the fifteen photographs that comprise this series, two visual elements are at play: a pile of overlapping black-and-white images and a pair of disembodied, outstretched arms striving to touch the images. The series is divided into five themes — Gravity, Rituals, Nature, Cosmology, and Anatomy — that reveal unexpected connections between our contemporary world and art history and theory. Each work contains three images piled on top of each other. The bottom-most images — archival photos of historical sculptures, from prehistoric monuments to ancient Greek statues of Egyptian deities — provide the works’ context. The middle images are more cryptic, with large sections “canceled” or rendered not visible by the other images, and function more as a vague frame. These images are photographic documents of performances from the 1960s and 70s in which the body becomes the art object. The top images are the only part of the pile that is fully visible. These images are small, low-resolution pictures of memes in which people perform some action that resonates with the content of the other layers. Based on Aby Warburg’s methodology of organizing art history thematically rather than chronologically, Lombardía’s artworks are like puzzles, allowing visitors to create linkages, constructions, and iconographic analogies between the images. Diamonds, an extension of the series, focus on the tension between objects and images. In these two-dimensional collage works with physical depth, Lombardía combines multiple overlapping images on different types of paper, emphasizing her interest in materiality.