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Cathy Immordino

Member of the Month December 2022

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Artist Statement

Isolate + Reflect

“Sometimes the worst thing that happens to you, the thing you think you can’t survive… It’s the thing that makes you better than you used to be.”- Jennifer Weiner, Fly Away Home

Isolate + Reflect is an internal reflection of my journey post-divorce on the path to rediscover myself. The work examines the darkness and emptiness left behind from a toxic relationship. I revisit the places we used to frequent as afamily in hopes of trying to find myself or something familiar there. As a divorcee noob, without form or character, I found myself having trouble navigating this new lifestyle of being a single parent. This was my existential crisis. Slowly, I began to find the life and color of who I really was. This never ending process of falling apart and becoming whole again plays out constantly in my life. I would rise only so far as to burn like a Phoenix and have to be reborn from my ashes. Most of these burn-like instances involved medical issues I had to overcome. Wondering if this is somehow my own internal selfsabotage, I began making this body of work out of a need to remove myself from the environment, literally, and take a look at how important what is that remains.

These prints are made with cyanotype and van dyke brown light sensitive emulsions that have been exposed with a CO2 laser. The prints have been hand colored with watercolored paint and pencils. The are made on Hahnemuhle 300gsm Platinum Rag paper. Each one is unique and one-of-a-kind.


Gallery


About

Cathy Immordino is a Los Angeles-based photographer, whose layered images combine images of personal experience and public spaces. Drawing on techniques and methods from fine art and photojournalism, Immordino’s optical layering serves as an evocative visual allegory for the complex narratives of life and memory. Immordino began her photography career after years of being a film actress, a set of experiences whose highs and lows she documented, along with architectural and urban landscape photographs of Hollywood at night. In subsequent projects and series, including a major project based on her own ancestry and the history of immigration in her immediate family, she has continued to refine and evolve this fundamental structure of literally layering her own stories and observations against backdrops of the iconic architecture, landscapes, and public spaces where they unfolded. In this way she collapses both time and space in a surreal but familiar language made of art history, biographical reportage, and photographic technology. Immordino exhibits her work in galleries and institutions and is associated with professional platforms and organizations including MOPLA, the LA Center for Photography, the Los Angeles Art Association, The Center Santa Fe, and the Society of Photographic Educators.

Cathy Immordino