September 16 – October 22, 2023
Gallery Route One presents Palabras Perdidas by artist member, Charles Anselmo. Engaging ongoing themes related to urban context and the role of memory, Anselmo explores the dissonances of the forgotten cityscape through large scale social-documentary photographs. As new work here presented in a site-specific photographic installation, Palabras Perdidas (Lost Words) is a visual mnemonic of an actual place: a representation meant to explore the relationship between the percipient and the perceived.
A visual narrative in translucent silk fabric and paper prints, the installation is based upon the fragmented detritus of an abandoned newspaper office. An extraordinary architectural relic in the style of Art Deco, this multi-story newspaper building was abandoned in the early 1960s; it is deeply characteristic of the strange dissonances that tend to coalesce around the patinas and textures of broken interiors.
Anselmo writes, “My photographic practice is to capture textured, deconstructed landscapes comprised of the historical fragments and skeletal details which ultimately reference the way in which the dynamic of memory itself changes our perception of the past. Palabras Perdidas is explicitly concerned with this intersection of place, memory and social context.”