The Louisiana Tech School of Design Galleries will be opening a new exhibition beginning Tuesday, September 29, with an artist lecture, "State of Unknowing," at 5 p.m., followed by an opening reception at 6 p.m.
"How does an injured mountain look? Does it bleed? Does it howl in pain? How does chronic pain look for a body that is 250 million years old?"
These are the questions at the center of La Montagna Addolorata, a five-channel video installation by interdisciplinary artist Alessia Lupo Cecchet, combining digital and analog artifacts to explore memory and violence through an engagement with non-human bodies.
The work relates to Lupo Cecchet's own upbringing in the Dolomite Mountains of Northern Italy, and to their role during World War I. Trenches, galleries, and sites of explosions are still visible in the mountains today, along with monuments memorializing the people who died there. To humans, though, this memory has largely faded. Like a sedimentary rock, human memory is built from layers of experience, imagination, and rewriting, and worn away by a process of erosion in which memories fade and chip away. This holds true for personal and collective memory alike, allowing for new reinterpretations of the past, for erasure, and for the perpetuation of injustices.
Lupo Cecchet addresses these themes through a process of unknowing. Rather than following the conventions of moving image, which tend toward linearity, closure, rhythm, clarity, and pathos, her videos are self-contained, durational loops that challenge the notion of action, focusing on the tension between movement and stillness, extended duration, and visual sustain. Conceived as an experiment in storytelling, the work invites viewers into contained and suspended experiences that raise questions and spark unexpected connections between the videos, the objects, and their own lived experience.
Alessia Lupo Cecchet is an interdisciplinary artist who works at the intersection of studio and media arts. Grounding her work in object-making, video, and history, she explores matters of decay, abjection, empathy, human exceptionalism, and temporality. Through an engagement with the nonhuman body as an access point for inquiry, she interrogates matters of knowledge-making and power. Lupo Cecchet grew up in the Dolomite Mountains of Northern Italy and is now based in Los Angeles, CA. She believes in a meaningful society that pays attention and asks questions.
The exhibition will continue through October 27, 2026. Both the exhibition and reception are free and open to the public. The exhibition will be located at School of Design Galleries F. Jay Taylor Visual Arts Center, at 1 Mayfield Ave, Ruston, 71272.
All exhibits are free and open to the public. Gallery hours: Sunday, 2 - 7 p.m.; Monday - Thursday, 9 a.m. - 6 p.m.; Friday, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.