Luisa Rabbia - Travels With Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008

During her residency at the Gardner Museum, Luisa Rabbia was inspired by photographs Isabella Stewart Gardner collected while traveling in China in 1883. For this exhibition, Rabbia has used these archival photographs to create a video of an imaginary landscape animated with her own drawings as well as other images and music. The result is a fantastical narrative that is both contemporary and historical.

Luisa Rabbia’s work is deeply rooted in drawing, which she sees as a platform that unites rational construct with the imagination. The dynamic tension that exists in drawing between the figure and its background, the being and becoming of space and time, has influenced much of Rabbia’s work with paper, papier-maché, porcelain and animation.

Luisa Rabbia was an Artist-in-Residence at the Gardner in 2007. She currently lives and works in New York and Turin, Italy.