Patti Ambrogi's works enter the collection

Photographer Patti Ambrogi provides artist’s statements on her Web site which should be visited to gain a fuller understanding of her various series, the Bentley Woods, and her career, which includes being Associate Professor in the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The artist’s statements that follow are provided in their entirety to convey the richness of her vision.

The Geography of Desire

The photographs map our interactions and our journeys on the earth, as we explore the spaces and the geometry and the boundaries of land we preserve through regional, national and international designations. The pieces explore our conceptions and idealizations of landscape; landscape as a way of seeing, a gaze referring to the eye and the lens, where landscape is the result of various practices materialized through evolving representations.

As the traveler in the Geography of Desire, I journey through preserved American and Canadian landscape turning my gaze toward the indexical traces of the traveler, suggesting that the event of framing, or the journey of the framer and her marks on the land, render an equally potent account for our conceptions of landscape, nature, and environment.

The pictures represent the way we identify with the land through our relationship with environment; how we practice our social and political roles both in terms of our journeys on it as well as our political negotiation of environmental policy, land use, and preservation.

The appropriation of the historic landscape format offers a symbolic way of engaging the slippages I offer as a response to the main text of historic nature photography, as I document the traces of our travel over these lands so precious that we both preserve them and exploit them.

So while our images of land and of geography relate to geological formations, they are powerfully motivated by our values, our practices and our politics, as well as our desires.

— Patti Ambrogi, October 2012

Bentley Woods

Bentley Woods is landlocked tract of old growth trees on the border of Monroe County. In 1921, a young woman named Janet Everest purchased 20.3 acres of uncut woodland to save it from logging. Before her death, Janet Everest Bentley donated the land to the Nature Conservancy, in 1963, as a nature sanctuary.

The overgrown roadbed that served the Bentley Woods is an extension of a current private drive, leaving the preserve land locked and accessible only through permission of surrounding landholders.

A few years ago, I gained access to the preserve, which is less than a mile from where I have lived for over 30 years. I spent many mornings there. I began to photograph, starting a project that I have come to call the Geography of Desire.

I researched the Bentley track in various documents of the Nature Conservancy and the Department of Environmental Conservation. They describe the lowland section as part of the Irondequoit Creek floodplain “harboring cedars and mature specimens of white pine and hemlock. One white pine has a DBH of 41 inches…. indicating that it is surely a first growth tree.” The DEC makes special mention of the Fen, which is a spongy layer of peat, a freshwater non-tidal wetland, giving the preserve the designation of “a significant natural community.”

The images enclosed here are the first in a continuing series of pictures that map the traveler’s interactions and journeys as we explore the spaces and the geometry and the boundaries of land we preserve through regional, national and international designations. Each journey explores another chapter of my own and our collective conceptions and idealizations of landscape as well as landscape as a way of seeing, or as the result of various practices materialized through evolving representations.

— Patti Ambrogi, April 18, 2012

Brief Bio

Patti Ambrogi is an Associate Professor in the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences at RIT where she teach the core classes in the graduate and under graduate fine art programs, classes ranging from 19th century processes to Moving Media for the Still Photographer as well as a series of courses that explore the descriptions that surround photography from Women and Visual Imaging, Media and Principled Positions, and Art and Censorship. Patti Ambrogi is the recipient of various honors and awards for her work including the Eisenhart Award for Outstanding Teaching. With grant initiatives, she established The Media Café in the School of Photographic Arts, which supports social interaction ‘over café’ and the production of temporal work that moves across the disciplines of photography, video, digital imaging, art, sound, and thought.

Education includes Ph.D. work in the American Studies program at University of Buffalo, an MFA Degree from The Visual Studies Workshop through the University of Buffalo, a BFA Degree from SUNY Albany with Magna Cum Laude honors, study at the Academia D’Art in Florence, the Dante Alleghieri School in Florence, the University of Siena in Italy, and The Summer Shakespearean Institute at Oxford University, England.

Exhibitions include various one person and group shows at galleries and museums including The Photographic Resource Center, Boston, Ma; The Menschel Gallery at Syracuse University; The Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester; Pyramid Art Center, Bevier Gallery, Memorial Art Gallery, Photo Gallery of RIT, George Eastman House, Tyler School of Art Gallery at Temple University; Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College; the Art Gallery of SUNY Albany; SUNY Potsdam; New Works Gallery in Chicago; the Biennial of São Paolo in Brazil; Art in General, Nikon House, and Cooper Hewitt in NYC; the Canadian Center for Photography in Toronto; the Center for Performing Arts in Nashville; Hallwalls and CEPA in Buffalo.

Nancy Weekly
Head of Collections and the Charles Cary Rumsey Curator

Email Nancy at weeklyns@buffalostate.edu.

Nancy Weekly is the Head of Collections and the Charles Cary Rumsey Curator for the Burchfield Penney Art Center, the world’s only museum dedicated to American watercolor master Charles E. Burchfield and artists of the Buffalo Niagara region. She also serves as an adjunct lecturer in Museum Studies for the Department of History and Social Studies Education at Buffalo State College.