Luisa Rabbia: Travels with Isabella

Luisa Rabbia: Travels with Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008 is a new video installation by the Artist-in-Residence. Rabbia’s interest in exploring memory and the past has built up a visual dialogue between two personal scrapbooks, her own and one of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s, from her trip to China in 1883.

The artist has used digital archival photographs, as well as, a combination of digital video and computer art to create Travels with Isabella, an imaginary landscape animated with drawings of Rabbia’s past work, digital films taken during her stay in Boston, and objects from the Gardner Museum collection. The video’s soundtrack was composed by Fa Ventilato.

Travels with Isabella is also the title of a new book by the artist documenting this work. It will be released this Fall in the United States, and in the Spring of 2009 in Europe. It is published by Edizioni Charta on the occasion of the Gardner exhibition. Luisa Rabbia: Travels with Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008 will travel to the Fondazione Merz in Turin, Italy, in January 2009.

Luisa Rabbia (b. 1970) is an Italian artist and was an Artist-in-Residence at the Gardner Museum in 2007. She lives and works in Brooklyn and currently shows with the Massimo Audiello Gallery in New York, the Giorgio Persano Gallery in Turin, and with Rossano Ciocco in Milan.

Luisa Rabbia: Travels with Isabella
Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008