BOSTON.- During her residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 2007, artist Luisa Rabbia was inspired by photographs Isabella Gardner collected and pasted into elaborate travel scrapbooks while traveling in China in 1883. The Italian-born, New York-based artist returns to the Gardner Museum this summer to present a new contemporary exhibition: Luisa Rabbia: Travels with Isabella, Travel Scrapbooks 1883/2008, on view June 27 through September 28, 2008.

In Travels, Rabbia takes and rearranges these archival photographs to create a video of an imaginary landscape, and a running panoramic view of her own journey through these photographs, and through space and time. The artist animates these archival photographs with her own drawings, along with music and other images inspired by her residency. The result is a fantastical narrative that is both contemporary and historical.

Luisa Rabbia’s first exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Travels with Isabella also provides an interesting and unexpected contemporary look at Isabella Gardner’s historic and fabled travels around the world – including to China and the Orient.

Rabbia collaborated on the new work with Fa Ventilato, a Swiss-born producer and musician who is well established for live projects in Europe and the U.S. and a regularly contributor of the music/sound for installations by international artists, including Rabbia, Monika Bravo and Moataz Nazar.

Luisa Rabbia’s work is deeply rooted in drawing, which she sees as a platform that unites rational construct with the imagination. The dynamic tension that exists in drawing between the subject figure and its background, the being and becoming of space and time, has influenced much of Rabbia’s work with paper, papiermâché, porcelain, and animation. Her evocative work was described in Artforum as “tinged with a sadness that spoke of the precariousness, isolation, and fragility of human existence.”

Luisa Rabbia was born in Turin, Italy in 1970 and currently lives and has a studio in New York City. She received a Masters’ degree from the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin and trained as a studio assistant to artist Gilberto Zorio of the Arte Povera movement. Rabbia has had solo exhibitions at Massimo Audiello Gallery in New York, Giorgio Persano Gallery in Turin, and Rossana Ciocca in Milan. She had a Special Project in Arte All’arte IX and X, curated by Associazione Arte Continua, S. Gimignano.