Spazio Labo’ and Leporello bookshop is hosting a special selection of queer-themed photobooks, available on the occasion of Jess T. Dugan’s exhibition, I want you to know my story

“There’s so much I can’t say in my photographs, and yet it’s all there, just below the surface, if you know what to look for.”

Jess T. Dugan

I want you to know my story is U.S. artist Jess T. Dugan’s first solo exhibition in Italy, born out of the publication of her latest project Look at me like you love me (Mack books, 2022) and curated by Laura De Marco with an original, never-before-seen production by Spazio Labo’.

In Look at me like you love me Jess T. Dugan reflects on desire, intimacy, friendship and the ways in which our identities are shaped by these experiences. In this highly personal project, Dugan weaves together self-portraits, portraits of people alone and in couples, still lifes, and a series of diaristic writings in which she reflects on relationships, loneliness, family, loss, healing, and the transformations that define a lifetime. Dugan has always used photography as a means to better understand his own identity and connect to others on a deeper level. His slow and collaborative working process unveils moments of high psychological intensity through images that transcend the specifics of a particular person or place, dealing with what it means to know oneself* together with and through others. Using medium-format cameras and natural light, Dugan incorporates traditional photographic practices to depict his contemporary subjects, resulting in images that evoke and reimagine the conventional dynamics of historical artistic portraiture. Put together, these photographs function as both an extended, indirect self-portrait and at the same time a catalog of friends and loved ones. Through an extended but studied sequence of images and texts, Look at me like you love me brings our attention to one of the most powerful and complex forms of intimacy, that of seeing and being seen*.

Inside the exhibition are videos and photographs previously unseen in Italy. The Spazio Labo’ and Leporello bookshop also hosts a special selection of queer-themed photography books, available for the duration of the exhibition. The exhibition is included in the calendar of the international Gender Bender festival and is part of Look at us – Review of non-conforming narratives: a program of exhibitions and meetings that from April to December 2023 Spazio Labo’ dedicates to the visibility and deconstruction of traditional family, identity and gender roles through the hybridization of visual languages.