“Georgina Lewis examines the crossroads of the human, natural and machine worlds. Through investigation and documentation, Lewis presents the unseen beauty of everyday life, and pushes the viewer’s understanding of what it means to be human.”
Georgina Lewis
“Like many people I am searching for ways to bridge the growing divides
of our country and world.”
group project; not a DNA test
I've been photographing bits of gum on the street: stuff that's been inside of people. The images all look somewhat the same but also like ghost bones or tortured meat: stand-ins for the internal, not skins and faces. You can't tell anything about the chewers (it's gum) but at the same time it's had their spit and you could run a DNA test and learn about them. In some ways it's a group project and you can see the marks of people's shoes, or soot, or bleaching from the sun. I'm interested in the discarded gum for its materiality and form, but also for its anonymous histories
I'm still learning how write or make work about injustice, fracking, or the anthropocene in a way that feels real or supportive. I'm not interested in extracting information about the chewers, it's the facelessness I'm drawn to, and the ubiquity and overlap. So far I've shot images in England, France, and the US but you can't tell from looking at them. They just hang together and I wish we could all drop our differences and do the same.*
These images are part of an ongoing series of photographs that I began in late 2015. At present I have several hundred of them. I show the prints in masses, installation style, unframed and usually adhered directly to the wall, as well as singly. I began this project several weeks before the Paris shootings of November 2015. Like many people I am searching for ways to bridge the growing divides of our country and world. Increasingly I see the works as necessary excavations towards a point of commonality from which rebuilding and rebonding (yes, cohesion, sticking together) might occur.
The above text was written prior to March 2020. The following was written at the end of May 2020:
*Looking at the images now I’m slightly horrified: this is a series I would and probably could not currently work on. They document a different time when leaving used gum in shared spaces might be considered gross or careless but not downright dangerous; when we had less fear of others and proximity.
ABOUT GEORGINA LEWIS
Georgina Lewis works across media, crafting images, objects, text and sound, drawing on what it means to be alive and cognizant in this world of imbalance and unease. She is interested in forms of interchange and the aberrations and novelties, intentional or not, that are introduced by the act of correspondence: what happens when one or more things come in contact with each other. Her process involves a set of ongoing negotiations between intuitive responses to materials and systematized frameworks laid well in advance. Conceptual and formal issues are of equal concern to Lewis, as she makes stories in pieces and delicate complications that examine the confluence of the human, natural, and machine worlds. Obsessed with nostalgia, glitter, trash, and drawing, she experiments with what it means to step away from the false sense of security offered by computers. She finds the risk taking involved with actually making something (unencumbered by technology) to be transformative. Lewis sees art-making is an act of resistance and hope. She worries about the world and believes that art plays a vital part in fixing it.
Raised in Pennsylvania and Nova Scotia, Georgina Lewis is a Boston based artist, writer, and curator. She received her MFA in Sound from Bard College and holds undergraduate degrees from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts and Franklin and Marshall College. She works across media in photography, installation, drawing, text, sound, and sculpture and is interested in forms of interchange and the aberrations and novelties, intentional or not, introduced by the act of correspondence: what happens when one or more things come in contact with each other. Georgina has been a resident at the Millay Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and VCCA France, as well as a fellow at Harvard University's metaLAB. Her work has been written about in The Boston Globe, Big Red and Shiny, The Wire, and Afterimage among others. Georgina is one of the studio artists at the Boston Center for the Arts, a former member of the Collision Collective, and a member of Fountain Street Gallery in Boston. Her work has been presented at numerous venues including the Visual Studies Workshop, National University of Ireland, REDCAT in Los Angeles, Boston Cyberarts Gallery, the Mills Gallery, Boston University's 808 gallery, and Grapefruits Art Space in Portland OR.