On View July 1 - August 1, 2025
Lisa Stancati is a photographer born in Queens, New York raised in Great Neck, New York. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in photography, a New York State Council on the Arts Creative Individual/Statewide Community Regrant, an Honorarium Arts Festival of Atlanta, a Special Opportunity Stipend East End Arts Council, and the Heckscher Museum Award.
She is in private and public collections, including The Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego. She received a BFA from SUNY College at Purchase with a degree in photography and an MS in Art Education from LIU, Post. She currently teaches in a public high school and resides in Port Washington, New York.
Artist's Statement
This series of work features plants from the artist's garden in Port Washington, Long Island. The photographs are cyanotypes that have been printed on fabric. The cyanotype is a turn-of-the-century photographic contact print process that relies on sunlight to make an exposure. The silhouettes come from the plant’s contact with the light-sensitized fabric. Combining this process with contemporary techniques such as digital negatives,the artist incorporates parts of herself in the images, showing only her handsor handwriting. It is about her engagement and interactions with the natural world.
The images with just plants are one of a kind. After they have been made,the plants are discarded only the print remains.The work is an invitation to reflect on the cycle of life and the impermanence of living things. Inspiration comes from the natural world and Anna Atkins, a woman pioneer of photography and botanist. She published a book in 1843 called British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, which was illustrated entirely with photographs. Some consider it to be the first photographic book. We now recognize and acknowledge the role she played and the contribution she made to the history of photography.
