ARTIST STATEMENT
My experimental photographic practice explores vision and memory, and the ways queerness, grief, and disability are understood and communicated. I am interested in how our identities, abilities, and lived experiences shape our perceptions, asking: How do we re-vision our lives over time? How do we see and remember? To explore these questions, I use a range of both lens-based and cameraless photographic techniques that embrace chance, mistakes, and unpredictability. I alter and damage film negatives, experiment with scanners in unconventional ways, and create cameraless works on film and paper, letting go of control as the work unfolds. My work also reflects a deep and ongoing engagement with home and place, past and present. I recycle and reuse photographs from my archive that are made over the span of years, reintegrating images into new works and reimagining my connections to them. By allowing the material process to guide the creation of the images, I am interested in occupying liminal spaces of not-knowing, where new questions and perspectives can emerge, while considering the complexities of memory and perception.
Additionally, I create land-based photographic works that consider the human impact of climate change, allowing photographic materials and the remains of plants and animals to to deteriorate and decay onto photographic film and paper. These slowly-created meditations on change both personal and environmental are in collaboration with the landscape and the weather, and can be seen in the projects The Lost Garden and Sciurus carolinensis I-X.
ARTIST BIO
Born in New Haven, CT, Mary Zompetti is a photographic artist living and working in Roanoke, VA. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the Lesley University College of Art and Design and a BFA in Visual Arts from Northern Vermont University. Her work has been exhibited for over 20 years both nationally and internationally, including at the Photographic Resource Center in Boston, MA; the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum in Roanoke, VA; the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA; the Mjólkurbúðin Gallery in Akureyri, Iceland; and the A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. She has attended artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont, and the Gil Residency in Akureyri, Iceland. Her photographs have been published in several books and magazines, including The Sun Magazine and in a recent volume from Another Earth Press, What Makes a Lake – Tracing Movement, featuring 80 artists creating a collaborative portrait the Earth’s rivers, lakes and oceans. Her work is held in several collections, including the artist book libraries at Yale University and the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity. In 2020, she was a recipient of the Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant in support of new and experimental cameraless photographic work, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. She was also granted a Provost Award for Summer Research from Hollins University in 2022.
From 2004-2020, she ran a public-access community darkroom and digital lab in Burlington, VT, and she is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography at Hollins University, a historically women's college in Southwest VA, where she teaches traditional and experimental photographic methods. She is currently working on a new series for a 2025 solo exhibition at the Iridian Gallery in Richmond, VA, the only gallery in the American South dedicated to featuring LGBTQ+ artists.
Email: maryzompetti AT gmail DOT com
Instagram: @maryzompetti