Hidden Worlds | Metaphysical Materiality

Months ago, gallery owner Susan Tinney asked Pam Longobardi, a surfer, conservationist, and art professor, to guest-curate a multi-artist exhibition at her gallery—Metaphysical Materiality is the fruit of their labor. The show runs through the end of July and features the work of a group of female artists hand-selected by Longobardi. Nashville Arts Magazine recently talked to the Atlanta-based mixed-media maven about her inspirations for the exhibit.

Longobardi’s love for the ocean goes back as far as her memory does. “My dad was an ocean lifeguard. We were swimming since we were babies.” This passion shapes her consciousness—it informs her every decision as a creative person. In a retail market largely driven by profit, Longobardi gives one hundred percent of the proceeds from her art to nature conservation. An avid surfer, she collects plastic debris from ocean habitats and forms them into elaborate objects and installations.

Facing a challenge like the Gulf oil spill, Longobardi believes that the message of her work is increasingly relevant. She understands the tragedy playing out for many conservationists, but her reaction is not all doom and gloom. Rather, Longobardi strikes a hopeful note. “Right now we are looking at a grim reality,” she laments, but her art is all about shifting perspectives and changing realities. “I like looking at the world from far away—the human scale is diminished.” Longobardi strives to offer “a different view of nature, so we can see nature as healthy.”

Longobardi’s statements on the environment are more than observations—they are almost like prayers. Her belief in the power of thought is the concetto of Metaphysical Materiality. “Painting can make thought manifest,” she repeats like a mantra. Longobardi’s insistence that the intangible realm of thought can be bodied forth in the art object relies on the same paradoxical language of the show’s title. How can the metaphysical be made material? For Longobardi, the answer takes place in the “space between words” that defines an experience of art. In her eyes, communication is everything.

When planning the exhibit, Longobardi looked at the problems facing the natural world. Historically, she thinks our reality has become increasingly “mechanistic and material.” She claims, “Too often we live in a world of material things. I think there are parallel worlds.” She says that the tension between concrete realities and imagination defines her art. For her sculptures, she swims in the ocean retrieving plastic waste that she transforms into art. Her paintings, though, are “inward and hopeful.”

For Metaphysical Materiality, she approached four like-minded artists. “We all share similar desires for larger realms of connection, and because we are all artists we can also make images of that.” The artists she chose—Peggy Cyphers, Carol Prusa, Margery Amdur, and Patricia Bellan-Gillen—each have resumés a mile long. The individual works of the five artists featured in the Tinney show have been exhibited in Germany, England, Belgium, Hungary, China, and Italy, just to name a few. Four of them are also art professors: Longobardi teaches at Georgia State University, Bellan-Gillen at Carnegie Mellon, Amdur at Rutgers-Camden, and Cyphers at Florida Atlantic University. Their qualifications and accomplishments are staggering, but for Longobardi it is their shared intuition and their hope for new ways of communication that make them ideal partners for this show.

Longobardi believes that in her own way, each of the artists in this exhibit offers viewers a parallel universe to the material and mechanical world of the technical age. When looking at their art, she claims to feel “the pulse of nature.” Longobardi hopes that viewers will “trust their instincts about looking” at these works and begin to experience the metaphysical realities that can only be described by art and intuition. Longobardi’s firm resolution that one can “think something into existence” is her abiding hope for the show. Asserting that nature is resilient, strong, and beautiful, she says, “I want to give voice and strength to that idea.”

Metaphysical Materiality opening reception is July 3, 6-9 p.m. at the Tinney Contemporary Gallery. This show runs through July 31.  tinneycontemporary.com

By Deborah Walden