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David Sollie Hollow Stone: The Life and Disappearance of Narek Grigoryan
Opening Reception: Friday, February 7, 6 to 8 pm Exhibition: February 8 through March 15, 2014
Bockley Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work by David Sollie titled Hollow Stone: The Life And Disappearance of Narek Grigoryan. A work of visual fiction, Hollow Stone is a brief look at the surroundings and inner life of an Armenian chemist named Narek Grigoryan through photographic image and short passages of text. Hollow Stone is an inventive and oblique narrative that skillfully blends fact with fiction, leaving the viewer to question and associate at will.
The Hollow Stone story is set in Soviet times. Grigoryan is working at a remote research facility near the town of Gyumri. In the surrounding mountains, hundreds of varieties of the Astragalus plant have been transplanted from sites throughout the USSR, and Grigoryan and his colleagues are tasked with exploring their pharmacological properties. Along the way he meets a fellow researcher, falls in love, and marries. Tragically, his beloved dies in childbirth and in despair he begins to spend all of his time with his research.
For some time Grigoryan’s coworkers simply view him as a hard-working eccentric, but everything changes when a new director arrives at the laboratory. This man becomes suspicious of Grigoryan, whom he witnesses talking occasionally to the ground. When he eventually overhears Grigoryan suggest that a species of Astragalus was used to fashion Christ’s crown of thorns, he has him removed by the KGB for ideological questioning. As it happens, Grigoryan is taken away on the very morning of the tragic Gyumri earthquake of 1988, an event that killed more than 25,000 people. Is there a connection between the disappearance of the chemist and the earthquake? Did Grigoryan manage to escape his interrogators in the chaos following the tragedy, or was he among the victims of the earthquake? Differing accounts of his motivations and disappearance are all that remain. Although fictional, Hollow Stone is rooted in real places and events. For example, there actually is a Hollow Stone, a monolith with ancient ritual significance pierced by a large hole, which attracts people to this day. The earthquake is the devastating 1988 Armenian earthquake that captured global attention and continues to effect people. Inspired by Sollie’s travels to Armenia in 2012 and 2014, Hollow Stone: The Life And Disappearance of Narek Grigoryan is “a parable about love and loss,” comments Sollie. “In part, it is about perseverance in the face of personal or communal tragedy.”
Many of the exhibition photographs are lush depictions of Grigoryan’s research and appear to have been printed 40 years ago using forgotten Soviet methods. Evocative landscapes featuring varieties of the Astragalus, starkly vacant earthquake-damaged buildings, and images of earthquake survivors will be represented in the show, as will images of the Hollow Stone.
A native of Wisconsin, Sollie was raised in Southern Minnesota and is currently based in Minneapolis. He majored in Art History and English Literature at Hamline University in Saint Paul. Sollie’s last exhibition with Bockley Gallery was 2010’s America’s Sweetheart: A Brief History of the Shackway Corporation.