Tracy Williams, Ltd. is pleased to present a series of photographs by the Italian artist Domingo Milella in his second solo show with the gallery. For nearly a decade, Milella has indirectly captured the flux of human civilizations by taking as his subject matter the ever - evolving frontiers of the urban landscape. Choosing sites that are conflicted in nature, where ancient and modern paradigms collide, he investigates man’s relationship to nature, history, and identity associated with geographic place.

Using an 8 x 10, large format camera, which allows for a prolonged image capturing process, Milella carefully constructs his compositions, resulting in a new order of the picturesque. Index (2004 - 2011), a unique sculptural piece comprised of thirty photographs taken over the course of seven years, presents an overview into the artist’s contemplative practice. Images of crowded villages are juxtaposed alongside the majestic quietude of cemeteries and ancient tombs, revealing the many stages of an urban-human lifecycle. Competing with the surrounding natural environment, we begin to see the transitional status of these urban landscapes unfold through the power relationships defining the struggle for space and endurance against passing time.

Far from achieving a sense of timelessness often associated with the medium of photography, Milella’s images are very much charged with the push and pull of receding and elapsing time. Influenced by the Italian film director, writer, and poet, Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose theories on the post-historical condition delineate a return to the pre-historical, Milella skillfully layers multiple temporalities into a single frame. He states, “Building an image of the past is to face the present, and activate the possibility of the future.”

Taking us on some of his most recent journeys through the Anatolian provinces, Myra, Turkey (2012) and Tomb of King Midas, Turkey (2011) exemplify this attempt to compress temporal distances while reexamining one's connection to cultural history in the present. These ancient Greek tombs represent an architecture of petrified expectations as well as meanings lost within the struggle against time beyond death. Milella likens our inability to decipher the Phyrgian writings inscribed onto King Midas's funerary monument to the way in which we confront photography today - as a set of rules only partially written, yet in a perpetual state of being recontextualized and decoded. Caught in between this slippage of losing information and a desire to recover traces of disappearing cultures, Milella questions photography's ability to document objects for posterity as well as the various expectations it produces for historical relevance down the road. In an age where digitalization has absorbed most of our languages and codes, Milella prefers to put his eyes and ears directly onto the original source.

Born in 1981, Domingo Milella lives and works between Bari, Italy and New York. He received his BFA from The School of Visual Arts, New York in 2005 and completed his artist's residency at The Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, in 2007. Among his notable mentors include Stephen Shore, Thomas Struth, and Massimo Vitali. Milella has held both solo and group shows in the United States, as well as internationally, including FOAM Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam (2008), Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Roma (2010), Les Rencontres d'Arles, France (2011), and Brancolini Grimaldi, London (2012), among many others.

Tracy Williams Ltd.
521 West 23rd Street
New York (NY) 10011 United States
Tel. +1 (212) 2292757

Opening hours
Tuesday - Saturday
From 11am to 6pm

Related images

  1. Arsemia, Turkey, 2013, Chromogenic print, 69 3/4 x 88 1/2 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Tracy Williams, Ltd., New York.
  2. Fraktin, relief, Turkey, 2013, Chromogenic print, Image: 69 3/4 x 88 1/2 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Tracy Williams, Ltd., New York.
  3. Rhodos, Greece, 2013, Chromogenic print, 69 3/4 x 88 1/2 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Tracy Williams, Ltd., New York.