The Ghost Residency
Presence, Absence & Ephemeral Connection
An Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Marc Zegans, poet
Tsar Fedorsky, photographer
MANSHIP ARTISTS 2020
The Project
Set on MARS (the Manship Artist Residency and Studios), the Ghost Residency came about when Marc, who had been invited to Manship prior to the COVID lockdown, speculated about whether a virtual residency would be possible from his base in Santa Cruz, California, and as to what such a residency might explore. Rebecca Reynolds (Executive Director) and Jo-Ann Castano (Board Chair) wondered how a ghost residency might be tied to the life and history of the Manship as well as its emerging program. In response, Marc began to play with what is present and absent, the connections we make over time and distance, and the traces we leave behind, as themes that might be explored with particular poignancy during this time of social distancing. When told that Manship would afford a local artist safe access to the house and its grounds, Marc began developing a narrative premise for a project in which a fine art photographer arrives at the property and begins to experience a strange sense of an unseen presence — a poet’s presence — living and working on-site.
The photographer’s intuitive perception soon gives way to more tangible interactions expressed through small physical disturbances—an open book; a door previously ajar, but now closed; a recently used glass sitting on a table. These encounters lead to a growing feeling that whoever might be here is in conversation with traces of earlier residents of the house. As the photographer continues to explore the property, absences and presences come into play, drawing the photographer’s attention and subtly announcing themselves in her photographs.
The Work’s Evolution
Marc was particularly taken with the work of Tsar Fedorsky, a Gloucester-based fine art photographer, especially her photo essays, The Light Across the Border and The Light Under the Door. When he read the opening line of her artist’s statement for The Long Way Home, “Sometimes I feel like a ghost, wandering endlessly. I feel restless about my life and apprehensive about my future. I often dream about life’s possibilities,” Marc knew that he had found his creative partner.
As it happened, Tsar lived on the same street as the Manship but had never set foot inside the house. She saw undertaking the Ghost Residency as an opportunity not only to enter the property but also to engage with it photographically. Accordingly, Tsar decided to undertake the role of the photographer encountering anomalies and disturbances—evidence of a possible resident, whom she came to believe was a poet, leaving open books, glasses of water, rumpled sheets and other indirect markers of his presence. In this capacity, Tsar functioned both as an artist, intent on capturing images that accorded with her aesthetic interests, and as the character of “the photographer” residing in and playing out this possible fiction, a process enriched by missives and poems sent by Marc during the course of her shoots.
In close and careful collaboration, Tsar and Marc shaped the photo essay from her collected images, forming a visual account of the Ghost Residency that provides a narrative sense of the encounter, while offering space for the essay’s constituent images to develop individual salience. The pictures in Ghost Residency converse with each other tonally, thematically, and compositionally, intensifying the viewer’s sensory experience while expanding the range of interpretive possibilities beyond simple serial fiction.
The completed essay invokes the layered presence we experience in the incomplete places to which minds and spirits are so powerfully drawn. This body of work lives in the liminal space between what is present and absent, and in the palpable sense of what may once have been there.
The Artists
Tsar Fedorsky is an American photographer. Her work centers on personal yet relatable narratives. She merges traditional and digital photographic techniques, and examines the tactile qualities of the photographic print. Her photographs have been published and exhibited worldwide. In 2018, Tsar received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts in Photography. Her series, “The Light Under the Door,” was published by Peperoni Books in August 2017. In 2015, she received an Artist Fellowship Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Tsar received an MFA in Photography from the University of Hartford and a BA from Amherst College. Ms. Fedorsky resides in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Marc Zegans is a poet and creative development advisor. He is the author of six collections of poems, most recently, The Snow Dead (Cervena Barva Press, 2020); two spoken word albums Night Work, and Marker and Parker, and the immersive theatrical productions Mum and Shaw, The Typewriter Underground, and with D. Lowell Wilder, 2020’s Sirens, Dreams and a Cat. Marc collaborates regularly with filmmakers, musicians and visual artists. At the start of his career Marc directed the Light, New York’s premier fine art photography gallery. Marc lives by the coast in Northern California.
Stone, Ghost, Life, 2020-Present. Photography. Photo by Tsar Fedorsky.
