A lot of meaning is packed into “Time and Again: Psychogeographic Meditations on Place,” the title of Mary Zompetti‘s exhibition of photographs in the Julian Scott Memorial Gallery at Northern Vermont University in Johnson. It’s easy to grasp the concepts of time, repetition and location, but that long word in the middle might be less familiar to some viewers.
In the mid-20th century, a Paris-based collective of artists and theorists called the Letterist International developed the concept of psychogeography, which refers loosely to the practice of strolling through an urban area and noticing one’s emotional reactions and associations. (The French have a word for such a stroller: flâneur.) Today, we might be more likely to call this “mindfulness,” perhaps because roaming unhurriedly and actually paying attention is a lost art.
Zompetti carried the idea of psychogeography out of the city: Her photographs on traditional film record her explorations of both her former rural environs in the Champlain Islands of Vermont and her current neighborhood in Roanoke, Va. She describes the latter as “a place where college professors, drug dealers, new Americans and many others from all walks of life co-exist.”
In her eloquent artist statement, Zompetti notes that from the moment she first picked up a camera, in 1999, she was compelled by “the idea of wandering at random, noticing what lay on the periphery.” Living in Boston at the time, carless, she would take familiar or new routes through the city, “wandering not only on foot but also in my thoughts.” When she looks back on those photos now, she writes, she feels “sensations beyond words from those moments in time.”
Zompetti moved to Vermont in 2001 to attend Johnson State College (now NVU) and graduated in 2005. From 2004 to 2020, she was the photography program director at Burlington City Arts; during those years she also taught photography at Champlain College and Community College of Vermont and earned a low-residency MFA from the now-closed Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University.
Zompetti compiled her Champlain Islands photographs into the four-issue quarterly 45 Degrees North in 2018. Shortly after its publication, she sustained an injury that impaired her vision, preventing her from using her camera for some time.
The artist accepted a position as assistant professor of art at Hollins University in Roanoke — a small, historically women’s college — and moved there just as COVID-19 arrived in the U.S. Despite the personal and professional challenges of the pandemic, the circumstances promoted spending time alone outdoors. Zompetti took to wandering her new locale, primarily via alleyways.
The color photographs in “Time and Again” are organized into three sections that Zompetti titled “Walking Distance: Roanoke, VA,” “Walking + Driving in the Lake Champlain Islands of Vermont” and “Time Continues to Move Forward as the Sun Rises and Sets.” The last section includes nature-based images from both locations, bookending Zompetti’s geographical shift.
None of the photos — which are unframed and pinned to the gallery walls — contains people. Perhaps that makes sense in a rural location, but the city images are somewhat eerie, showing the houses from the back. The alleyways, Zompetti said, “function as a network of dirt roads behind the houses and are not necessarily shown on a map. These spaces hold a feeling of wildness.”
What’s most engaging about the photographs is their multiple exposures, which Zompetti usually does in-camera. “This forces me to let go of control of exactly how the layering works out,” she wrote in an email, “and I enjoy the surprise when I get the film back from the lab.”
More recently, she’s been layering images in Photoshop, Zompetti added. Either way, the exposures reinforce the notion of the artist navigating these locations over and over — time and again — and visually mimic the processing of emotional reactions. Zompetti hopes viewers will speculate about the experience of moving through the spaces she has captured, noticing their own responses.
“Unpredictable change and movement are part of the concept of the exhibition,” she wrote. “For me, this is the more interesting dialogue to have around the work.”
Zompetti will give an artist talk at a closing reception on Thursday, March 16, at 3 p.m.
This article appears in Mar 8-14, 2023.
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