MoCP Newsletter

March 7, 2008

Recent Acquisitions

Bill Owens, This is Valerie’s world in miniature. She makes it what she wants it to be…without war, racial hate or misunderstanding. Ken and Barbie (dolls) are man and woman rather than Mom and Dad. The enjoy living and having a camper truck is the good life. Today Valerie has the chicken pox and can’t go out and play.

Recent acquisitions at the MoCP include works by Beate Gutschow, Amy Stein, Wendel A. White, Harry Callahan dye transfer prints, Isabelle Hayeur, Graciela Iturbide, Andre Kertesz, and Sergei Krilov. We also added photographers from Estonia, who were previously unrepresented in our permanent collection, including Margus Nickopensius, Tonu Noorits, Peter Laurits, Eve Linnap, and Peeter Linnap.

In this edition of the MoCP newsletter we’d like to spotlight recent acquisitions of work by artists Bill Owens and Shizuka Yokomizo. Bill Owens’ work from his Suburbia project was purchased for our upcoming exhibition Beyond the Backyard, but also to fill a gap in our permanent collection as he has been a notable photographer documenting the American lifestyle since the 1970s.

In the late 1960s and the 1970s, as suburban development expanded rapidly in the United States, Bill Owens carried out a groundbreaking photographic study of suburban life in Livermore, California, where he worked as a staff photographer for the local newspaper. His first book, Suburbia (1973), depicted events such as neighborhood barbecues, Tupperware parties, PTA meetings, and garage sales, and featured people in their homes and yards as they watered their lawns, watched their children, or dipped into their liquor cabinets. A seminal portrayal of a burgeoning way of life, the book received immediate critical acclaim and has influenced a generation of photographers.

Shizuka Yokomizo, Stranger (5)

The Yokomizo purchase expands our collection of contemporary Asian photographers and introduces new ideas of collaboration and voyeurism in photography. MoCP Curator Karen Irvine included Yokomizo’s work in 2003 in her exhibition, The Furtive Gaze. The following text is from her essay for the exhibition:

Yokomizo sends her subjects an anonymous letter proposing they stand in their front window at a specified date and time, at which point the artist arrives outside, photographs for a few minutes, and then leaves. The subjects are instructed to wear their usual clothing, remain calm, and turn on all their lights. Because the hour selected is during the night, Yokomizo’s subjects can discern the photographer only as a dark silhouette setting up her tripod and camera, exposing her film, and leaving… Read on…

Coming Soon!

Building Pictures: April 4 - May 31, 2008

Alexander Apóstol

Work by:
Alexander Apóstol
Dionisio Gonzalez
Terence Gower
Luisa Lambri
Chris Mottalini
Bas Princen
Thomas Ruff
Josef Schulz

Building Pictures explores connections between architecture and photography, from methods of spatial representation to the relationships between the real and virtual worlds in each discipline. It examines the responses of artists to the ideals of modern and postmodern design, and explore the connections between the immersive natures of both photography and architecture and the networks of spatial relationships on which they depend. Topics explored include architecture as idealized public space, the idea of progress, and the challenge of how to represent it photographically. Please join us for an opening reception on April 3 from 5-7pm.

MoCP at the New York Photo Festival!

The Museum of Contemporary Photography is proud to present one of several satellite shows at the New York Photo Festival, May 14 - 18, 2008. The MoCP will present six emerging artists who investigate the quirky, random, sometimes mundane aspects of their lives to create work which is simultaneously diaristic and universal. Organized by MoCP curators Natasha Egan and Karen Irvine, the exhibition includes work by Melissa Catanese, Jonathan Gitelson, Nate Larson, Jason Lazarus, Ed Panar, and Stacia Yeapanis.

MPP News and Notes

Commute #11(truck)

Suzette Bross
Bross had a solo show of her Commute:Trucks work at the Schneider Gallery in June, and was recently included in Commercial Woman at the WomanMade Gallery. She is currently in a show called Are We There Yet?: 40 Years of Feminism at the ARC gallery. Bross was also commissioned by Northwestern Memorial Prentice Woman’s Hospital to
produce a series of portraits of Chicago women for the new hospital. Her images are currently on display on the hospital’s 3rd floor.

Sarah Faust
One of Sarah Faust’s images was chosen for the 2007 Photo Review Competition curated by Toby Jurovics, Curator of Photography, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. The publication of winners and accompanying online publication were published in February 2008.

Jennifer Greenburg
The Center for American Places is publishing a full-length book of Greenberg’s work, The Rockabillies, which will be released in Fall 2009. She recently participated in the group shows A New Direction at Wall Space Seattle; A Just Image: Selections from the LightWork Collection at LightWork, Syracuse, NY; The Pin Up Show: Images from A Field Guide at Gallery Bar, New York City; and Home for The Holidays at Wall Space Seattle. Greenberg was also recently featured on the arts website First Post UK.

Amber Hawk Swanson
Amber Hawk Swanson’s current body of work, To Have, To Hold, and To Violate: Amber and Doll, will debut in a solo exhibition at Locust Projects in Miami, opening on May 10, 2008. She will be exhibiting photographs and videos in conversation with live performance components. A preview of the exhibition will be included in the group show, Henbane: Dialectics of the Feminine Sublime at Medicine Park Gallery, Chicago, opening on March 21, 2008. Recent screenings include the Rubber Doll World Rendezvous in Minneapolis and Threat Level: An Evening of Queer Shorts in Chicago.

Dave Jordano
Jordano is currently exhibiting at the Historic Water Tower City Gallery of Photography. The show is about Marktown, a small neighborhood in East Chicago, IN and runs till May 4. He was also included in 6X6 (six images by six photographers) at the Rooke Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa, a global competition with participation by invitation only. Jordano’s monograph in the 6×6 limited edition book set published by the Society of Photographers, is available at photoeye.com.

Nate Larson
Nate Larson’s solo exhibition Miracle Pennies & Other Stories is currently at the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati. In December, he participated in a two-week artist residency with the Hungarian Multicultural Center in Budapest, Hungary.

Paula McCartney
McCartney’s Bird Watching artists’ book was recently acquired by the New York Public Library and Vassar College. She will be exhibiting in a solo show, Ornithological Interpretations, at the Rochester Art Center in Rochester, MN, opening March 29. An image from Bronx Zoo and the artist’s book Bird Watching are included in Ornithology: Looking at Birds at the Contemporary Art Galleries at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, through April 3. McCartney’s work is also featured in the Society of Photographers limited edition book set 6×6 and the exhibition of the same name at the Rooke Gallery in Johannesburg, through March 20.

Stan Strembecki
Strembecki’s work is currently on view in Lost Library and Memory Loss, a solo exhibition at Philip Slein Gallery in Saint Louis. Two prints from this series were recently acquired by the Kresge Museum of Art in East Lansing, MI.

Stacia Yeapanis
Stacia Yeapanis and fellow MPP artist Amber Hawk Swanson are included in an upcoming group show, Henbane: Dialectics of the Feminine Sublime, at Medicine Park Chicago.

We would also like to extend a warm welcome to new MPP artists CariannaCarianne and Tricia Moreau Sweeney.

Ones to Watch: Orit Siman -Tov

Rescue Excavation, The Western Wall Plaza, 2007, C-print

We are pleased to announce that new limited-edition prints are now available online from the 2008 Fine Print Program, featuring a work from Israeli artist Orit Siman-Tov.

Orit Siman-Tov’s photographs examine how diverse factors—geographical, historical, political, social, and religious—shape perceptions of particular places in Israel and also affect the activities of the people who visit them. Her recent Rescue Excavations series focuses on the state-mandated excavation projects carried out prior to new construction. Intended to protect valuable archeological findings from being irreversibly damaged, in effect these excavations strip away layers of the current landscape to reveal a glimpse of a location’s past.

Officially speaking, these investigations rarely yield consequential discoveries, and new development is usually approved, but Siman-Tov’s photographs find these routine procedures to be compelling revelations in their own right. In the process her work sheds light on the constant negotiation of architectural planning, state law, and cultural values, showing these excavation sites to be densely layered constructions of more abstract forces as well.

Siman-Tov received a BFA in photography from Bezalel Academy of Art, Jerusalem (1997). Her work has been exhibited in Israel at the Herzlia Museum of Art and the Haifa Museum, and in Chicago at the Schneider Gallery, among other venues. She has received a Young Artist prize from the Israeli Ministry of Education, and she was a finalist in 2007 for the International Jewish Artists of the Year Award in association with the London Jewish Museum of Art/Ben Uri Gallery. Her work is held in a number of public collections, including the Haifa Museum, Israel.

Permanent Collection Spotlight: An-My Lê

Night Operations #7, from 29 Palms series, 2003-04

Last year’s critically acclaimed exhibition of two series by Vietnamese-American artist An-My Lê, Small Wars and 29 Palms, is currently on view SFMoMA. Lê works with a large-format camera to capture these images of staged war, in compositions that give equal weight to the landscape in which the theater occurs. Her equipment and working method are reminiscent of those employed by the Civil War photographers, though Lê’s pictures address issues of war by looking at the preparation for combat instead of its aftermath.

This edition of the MoCP newsletter includes contributions from Natasha Egan, Kristin Freeman, Karen Irvine, and Karsten Lund.

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