Allison Lasley: Rome Journals

Rome, perhaps more than any other western city, symbolizes the contradictions of human history. An object lesson in the transitory nature of power, it offers anyone who would wander its streets continual reminders of its rises and declines. Crumbling remnants of ancient Roman aqueducts abut modern thoroughfares, while grand Renaissance colonnades and elaborate Baroque churches mingle with bustling street markets, suggesting a fading deference to glorious pasts which now exist only in memory. Meanwhile, on the perennially crowded streets and squares, tourists, peddlers, office workers and shopkeepers carry on their daily activities with only scant consciousness of the inescapability of the history which weighs down on them from every side.

The magic of Rome is one of the subjects of Allison Lasley’s “Rome Journals”. The other is her own day by day subjective response to the experience of living in a city where yesterday and today knock up against each other with little ceremony and no discrimination. This work is the artistic record of Lasley’s three month stay in Rome in the fall of 1997. As a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, Lasley tried to work every day. However, anticipating difficulties in getting large scale works back home at the end of her stay, she decided to experiment with a new approach to her art.

For some time, Lasley had been creating multilayered wood and plaster abstract paintings which were occasionally affixed with gold leaf and other materials. She began to adapt the aesthetic embodied in these works to the medium of paper and paper collage. These became a series of small six by six inch panels which served as records of her daily life.

Using water soluble inks and paints and bits of the flotsam and jetsam which she collected as she wound through the city, Lasley created a visual diary. It records her moods, the sights of the city, and even, by way of the collage elements, traces of the actual events of her three month stay. Arranged in a grid in the order in which they were produced, the paper squares create a mosaic of memory which conveys to the receptive viewer the emotional reality of Lasley’s subjective experiences.