Penelope Umbrico “Slide Show”
LMAKgallery
This event has ended.
LMAKprojects presents Slide Show by Penelope Umbrico, her second solo show with the gallery. The exhibit features 136 Mini Film Cameras in the Smithsonian Institution History of Photography Collection With Old Style Photoshop Filter, a vitrine containing the photographs Umbrico made during her Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Though once revolutionary tools, in their current state these cameras are inanimate and obsolete. Carefully tagged and archived, Umbrico’s archival pigment prints, with “Old Style” Photoshop filter appear as faded cameras entombed within the virtine.
In dialogue with these photographs, Umbrico presents Mountains, Moving - Slide Show, a work from her ongoing project Mountains, Moving. Here, she looks to the mountain as a subject of stability in relation to the present instability of photography. Umbrico writes:
‘Mountains, Moving’ considers an analog history of photography within the digital torrent that is its current technological manifestation. I steady my focus on the mountain: oldest subject, stable object, singular, immovable landmark, site of orientation, place of spiritual contemplation. I employ smartphone camera apps to make new photographs of the images of mountains that appear in canonical master photographs I find in books and online. Pointing my iPhone down at these mountains, the hallucinogenic colors of the camera app filters blend with the disorienting effects of the iPhone’s gravity sensor. Photo grain, dot-screen, pixel, and screen resolution collide, often performing undulating moirés. My mountains are unstable, mobile, have no gravity, change with each iteration, re-mastered. Here is
the biggest distance, the longest range. I present a dialogue between distance and proximity, limited and unlimited, the singular and the multiple, the fixed and the moving, the master and the copy.
For LMAKprojects, Umbrico’s Slide show concentrates on a singular mountain photographed by Ansel Adams (whose intention it was to make his negatives and prints available to his students to learn by). By processing this mountain though the 526 filters of 27 smart-phone camera apps she uses, Umbrico constructs a synthetic time-lapse: everything changes, but the ghostly apparition of the mountain remains.
[Image: Penelope Umbrico “Screen-capture” iPhone Camera Roll, (2013)]
Media
Schedule
from September 08, 2013 to October 13, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-09-15 from 16:00 to 18:00
and artist talk.