Longobardi is the recipient of the Margie E. West Prize, an annual prize given to an esteemed alumni from the Lamar Dodd School of Art, and was invited to create a new exhibition for the Marjorie E. West Gallery.
The Flat Earth Society: a Visitation
October 14 – November 18, 2021
Marjorie E West Gallery, University of GeorgiaClimate change and mass extinction are undeniably real and visible to all yet so many heads are still in the sand while the world burns, melts, weeps and dries up. In this way, I am reminded of the infamous ‘Flat Earth Society’, a mid-19th c. re-invention based on archaic beliefs that somehow still hold weight in some circles of contemporary society.
These paintings are a visitation from a farther future of imagined beautiful disasters. Storms unfold, release energies, dissipate and reform, moving matter in spectacular cataclysms. The grand narratives of human conquest are a story of the past. That ship has sailed. How we will transform? A future for ourselves is constantly being written. By a mother for her elephant child. By an octopus for her human friend. By an old tortoise for his foundling baby hippopotamus. There is only one story worth telling. The magnetic north, the true pole star, the singular constant, is love. What will be the next incarnation of unbounded earthly love?
