Scott Turri - "The Longing Ritual"

This exhibition, The Longing Ritual is a culmination of work made over the last few years. It is a meditation on Turri's habitual walking and exploration of the neighborhoods of Squirrel Hill, Point Breeze, the Homewood Cemetery and Frick park. The exhibition features 5 large paintings (45”h X 80”w),  and one wall sized experimental animation along with two animations on a monitor in the vestibule of the gallery. The work is intended to capture the ephemeral nature of memory and how it gets embedded through the natural and built environment.

More info: https://calendar.wvu.edu/site/ccarts/event/visiting-artist-lecture-scott-turri/

I step into wet muddy ground and spot groups of cardinals flitting in the scrub brush and families of deer examining me while their jaws move in a rhythmic circular motion munching on new leaf growth. There are woodpeckers tap tapping on dead tree limbs and the distant steel mills are behemoths on the horizon. I look through the void to get to the memory. The rituals start in the bedroom where I sleep and wake. The pill shape comes from the laundry baskets filled with stuffed animals on top of our wardrobe. Seen alone or in grid like passages they are barriers that you can peer through to read the chapters of the stories. The stories are pieced together from imagery, intentional layers of separation from the real thing. Memory – looking within, how we remember events. We are drawn to this void. It is about the moving images and the still images; combining imagery of place through the memory of photography. The interior is my bedroom, behind my eyes with the laundry baskets. The bedroom where I dream, housed within my memory, my mind. The pills are my eyes.