MoCP Newsletter

November 14, 2006

RECENT ACQUISITIONS

Esther Parada, #15 from Site Unseen, 1976

MoCP is pleased to announce a major gift from the estate of artist, writer, and educator Esther Parada, who passed away in October 2005. This gift from the family of Esther Parada (Adam Wilson, son; Susan Peters, sister; Margo Davion, sister; Ben Glaser, brother) of 417 photographs includes works by many South American, Mexican and Cuban photographers, as well as scores of colleagues and friends of Esther’s in the American photography community from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.

A recent gift of 18 Jay Wolke photographs is from Ralph and Nancy Segal, long-time friends and donors to MoCP.

The artist Barbara DeGenevieve gifted 10 prints and 2 DVDs from her series The Panhandler Project.

New to the Permanent Collection are 5 photographs from the Gamers series by Todd Deutsch, an MPP artist. MoCP also recently acquired 3 artworks by
Robert Heinecken, whose work will be on view in January in a major exhibition at the museum; a large photograph by Paul Shambroom; 24 works by Ashley Gilbertson, some of which are currently on view in War Fare through January 6; and a work by Lynn Goldsmith.

"NOT VICTIMS": AN INTERVIEW WITH COCO FUSCO

Still from Operation Atropos (2006, digital video, 59min), courtesy of the artist

Intrigued by the role of women as “not victims, but victimizers” in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, multimedia artist Coco Fusco decided to learn about interrogation techniques herself. In July 2005, Fusco took a course designed for civilians who want to learn techniques for extracting information (or resisting interrogation themselves) led by Team Delta, a group of former US military interrogators. She took a group of six women with her and filmed the workshop, which we see unfold in Operation Atropos (2006, 59 min.), a verité study of prisoner experience as well as an investigation of the role of gender in the psychological interplay between interrogator and prisoner. Team Delta’s course required Fusco and her team to take part in an immersive simulation of being prisoners of war: they were ambushed, captured, strip-searched, jailed, subjected to humiliation, and interrogated repeatedly. Although all participants in the project are aware that capture and interrogation is a simulation, the atmosphere of the exercise becomes increasingly intense, especially when some of the women are led to believe that a member of their group is being hurt. Afterwards, the participants were taught how to inflict on others what had been done to them.

MoCP is pleased to present a screening of Operation Atropos on Saturday, November 18, 2006 at 7pm. Coco Fusco will introduce the film and answer questions from the audience afterward. Arrive early and view the exhibitions An-My Lê: Small Wars and 29 Palms and War Fare. The museum will extend its hours until 9:00 pm.

MoCP Web Administrator Audrey Mast conducted this interview with Ms. Fusco via email in November 2006.

MoCP: In Greek mythology, Atropos was one of the three Fates, the “cutter of the thread of life.” Can you explain the significance of the title Operation Atropos?

CF: The military gives its initiatives and projects all sorts of weird pseudo symbolic names: “Operation Condor,” “Operation Phoenix,” and so on. Operation Iraqi Freedom is pretty mundane for a title by comparison. So I chose a mythological figure representing a female with the power to send a person to their death. It seemed appropriate as a description of what interrogators sometimes do.

MoCP: Is this workshop a “labor of love” of sorts for Team Delta? Do you think they enjoy it? What kinds of people usually take this workshop?

CF: Team Delta does do their work because they enjoy interrogation – at least that is what they say. According to co-founder Mike Ritz, their main clients are law enforcement types, military people, military aficionados, and academics.

MoCP: How did you choose the women you brought with you?

CF: Some of them were former students who were interested in the project. Others were women artists who knew my work and expressed interest in joining the group. Several women who originally were interested backed out when they saw films in which Team Delta appeared and demonstrated their tactics.

MoCP: I’m curious about the “resistance techniques” that Team Delta didn’t allow you to film. [Early in the workshop, the instructor asked Fusco and her crew to stop filming while they taught these techniques]. Can you elaborate on what we missed, or why they didn’t want that portion of the workshop filmed?

CF: The resistance tactics we were taught were fairly simple. Basically, we were told to feign weakness and do everything slowly. That means that you can give them the impression of wanting to cooperate with your captors, but of being physically unable to comply with all their orders. Open defiance, we were taught, could lead to being shot in the head. I think they didn’t want us to film just to scare us a little. In reality, there was no classified information being transmitted.

MoCP: Can you describe your process working with Kambui Olujimi, your Director of Photography, and the stylistic choices you or he made in camerawork?

CF: Kambui and I have worked on a few projects together and he really understands my sensibility. He also has a lot of experience shooting contact sports so he is good at getting into the action and moving with the participants. I wanted the video to look like reality TV. That, for me, is the genre that represents the “you are there” aesthetic that once upon a time was associated with Cinema Verité. It also stands for a regular person’s point of view. Audiences watching reality TV usually expect that they are going to have a person’s private moments revealed to them in ways that could be humiliating. That is pretty much what was going on in the course.

MoCP: I recently read an interview with Lynndie England in Marie Claire magazine in which the journalist describes at length her relationship with a male superior officer who humiliated her sexually, suggesting that her actions at Abu Ghraib stemmed from this history of abuse. In your film, you and the other workshop participants must submit to humiliation and “abuse” in order to learn to interrogate. What are your thoughts on this?

CF: First, I think too many feminists want to be let off the hook by assuming that women’s violent behavior is the byproduct of their own victimization by men. I don’t buy that argument. America’s foreign policy is being managed by a black woman (Condoleeza Rice), and no history of female oppression or slavery and racism can justify her actions. Lynndie England is an adult, and as such she is fully responsible for her rather atrocious actions.

It is important to point out that England was a military policewoman, not an interrogator. My work is about interrogation, more than policing. Another thing to keep in mind is that there are many female officers who are directly responsible for giving orders that lead to the abuse of detainees. There are a lot of women in military intelligence, and some of them are the generals who have given the go-ahead to torture prisoners.

There are also female interrogators who sexually humiliate male prisoners as a tactic designed to break them. Recently one female interrogator who was a Mormon committed suicide because she could not deal with what she was being ordered to do in the interrogation room.

ONES TO WATCH: MPP EDITION

WITH KENDRA GREENE

To celebrate our newly-launched recurring feature (see below) on the myriad accomplishments of our Midwest Photographers Project (MPP) artists, MoCP’s Manager of Collections, Kendra Greene, shares three of her favorite participants.

Julie Blackmon

Balloon, 2002

Springfield, MO-based Julie Blackmon’s MPP portfolio, the Mind Games series depicts wonder as the natural occupation of children. These photographs have the respectful un-orchestrated air of a document combined with the beauty and insight of an informed interpretation. Neither nostalgic nor sentimental, these pictures explore childhood play from a range of physical perspectives and are printed in an invitingly lush tonal range. The emphasis on play (and not just the children who engage in it) is seen in Blackmon’s attention to the places and objects that inform play, the way her subjects merge seamlessly with those elements or otherwise make them their own. Their absorption in their activities emphasizes the interior world of play, also suggested by the presence of usually only one child in each picture.

Her new series, Domestic Vacations, currently on view through December 30 at Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago, is a lush and complex depiction of family life inspired by Jan Steen and other Dutch and Flemish genre painters. Blackmon is represented by Photo-Eye, Santa Fe, NM, and Catherine Edelman Gallery.

***

Jennifer Greenburg

The Stricklands, 2003

Since 2001, Chicago native Jennifer Greenburg has taken the mantles of both participant and voyeur while photographing rockabillies throughout the Midwest. Her large-scale color photographs show not only the 1950s clothing and décor favored in rockabilly culture, but also the activities and values her subjects have adopted in accordance with that era. While their revival of a mid-20th century middle-class lifestyle is meticulous, it is equally selective, borrowing from a particular vision of American life rather than seeking to recreate its realities. A subtly selective focus in these pictures draws attention to particular details in each scene, a cue that the photographer is interpreting and not just recording the places and poses before her.

Greenburg recently had a solo show, Recalling Americana, at The Hyde Park Art Center and exhibited work at the Loyola University Museum of Art. She was awarded Honorable Mention by The Illinois Committee of The National Museum of Women in the Arts and exhibited for that committee at Gage Gallery in 2006. Contact Sheet, the annual publication produced by Light Work, Syracuse, NY, (where Greenburg was an artist-in-residence and given the corresponding grant in 2005) features a chapter on Greenburg’s work. She is represented by Photo-Eye.

***

Paula McCartney

Bird Watching, (Dark Eyed Junco), 2003

St. Paul, MN-based Paula McCartney’s densely wooded landscapes are enlivened, ironically, by brightly colored craft store songbirds. While the deceit is more obvious in some pictures than others, what bears noticing is how these faux fowl punctuate their environments both as formal elements carefully arranged amid the arc and curve of brush and branches, and as a curious construction that offers an idealized vision of nature undercut by the gentle satire of that ideal.

Recent solo shows by McCartney include Natural Selections at ElectroLift Artworks, Minneapolis, MN; Bird Watching at the Minnesota Center for Photography; and an installation at Minnesota Projects Gallery, Minneapolis, MN. McCartney’s work has been featured in Photography Now: One Hundred Portfolios. Her work has recently been collected by the Walker Art Center, Yale University, UCLA Arts Library, University of Arizona, and the University of Delaware.

***

This section features original text from mocp.org by Kendra Greene with recent news and updates compiled by Audrey Mast.

MPP NEWS AND NOTES

Inaugurated in 1982, the Midwest Photographers Project is a rotating collection of portfolios by both prominent and emerging photographers from Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Each portfolio represents a current body of work from a recent or on-going project, and is loaned to the museum for a two-year period. Spanning a diverse array of media, subject matter, and style, MPP is a unique and expansive resource on contemporary regional photography. As of 2006, it includes nearly 1000 photographs by 56 photographers, with new portfolios introduced almost every month. Current portfolios are housed in the museum’s Print Study Room and may be viewed by appointment.

This is the first of an ongoing feature in our e-newsletter on the accomplishments of our MPP artists.

Wafaa Bilal, Generation, 2002

Wafaa Bilal will present his works The Human Condition and Midwest Olympia at the inaugural exhibition of The Pawn Gallery in Dallas, TX, from December 1 – 31, 2006.

Larry Chait will participate in “The Chicago Project,” an online gallery presented by Catherine Edelman Gallery devoted to promote new and established photographers in the Chicago area, and has a photo published in the November/December issue of Camera Arts magazine.

Paul Clark is one of six photographers selected by Leslie A. Martin of the Aperture Foundation for the Current Works 2006 exhibition at the Society for Contemporary Photography in Kansas City, MO, from December 1, 2006 – January 30, 2007. Clark will exhibit his recent Barrier series.

Kelli Connell was featured in MP3 – the recent exhibition at MoCP and trio of books co-published with the Aperture Foundation – as well as group exhibitions at Lafayette College, Easton, PA; Photographic Center Northwest, Seattle, WA; University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Minnesota Center for Photography, Minneapolis, MN; Central Michigan University; Center for Photography at Woodstock, NY. She will also have solo exhibitions at Rebecca Ibel Gallery in Columbus, OH in February/March, 2007 and at Yossi Milo Gallery, NY in April/May 2007. She is featured in the Phaidon Press anthology Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in
Photography.

Joeff Davis’s photographs were featured in People of Compassion and Other Strange But True Images at the Brickton Art Center in Park Ridge, IL, and his work is currently on view in Home and the War at the Composition Gallery, Atlanta, GA. In February 2006 he traveled to Venezuela on a trip sponsored by the Venezuelan government, touring and photographing the country and the social revolutionary programs there. In June he finished photography work for a Chicago travel guide which will be published in spring 2007 by Dorling Kindersley. In 2006 Davis’s photographs were published in the book I Mean It From My Heart: Stories and Portraits In Chicago Blues (University of Illinois Press). He is the staff photographer for the progressive newspaper Creative Loafing.

Deanna Dikeman, Relative Moments, part of St. Louis Metro Arts in Transit, 2006, courtesy the artist.

Deanna Dikeman’s photographs were recently in a public art project in St. Louis, MO called Metro Arts in Transit.

Sarah Hoskins was awarded the
only Honorable Mention at The Annual Gordon Parks Finalists exhibition and competition in Fort Scott, KS. She was also recently selected
as an Honorable Mention for the 2006 fellowship competition/exhibition at Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh. In spring 2006, she had a solo exhibition of her project The Homeplace at The Salt Institute For Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine. An article on this work was featured in American Legacy magazine and an interview on WURD Radio in Philadelphia. Hoskins’ work from The Backside of Horseracing was featured on The Digital Journalist this past year. Hoskins is included in Photography Now: 100 Portfolios. She will also lecture at Empire College in January/February at the Women in Photography workshop.

Collaborative duo Industry of the Ordinary,
(MPP artist Adam Brooks and Mat Wilson) will participate in Site Unseen at the Chicago Cultural Center, on Wednesday November 15 (6-9pm). Industry of the Ordinary has completed a number of recent projects, including Homeland Security.

Nate Larson has recently had solo exhibitions at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Graceland University, Lamoni, IA; Morris Graves Museum of Art, Eureka, CA; and the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN. His work has been included in group shows at Open Space, Victoria, BC, CA; The Light Factory, Charlotte, NC; Dam, Stuhltrager Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; and the Rockford Art Museum, Rockford, IL. In summer 2006 he was invited to return to the Banff Centre in Alberta to participate in a seven-week thematic group residency titled Babel, Babble, Rabble: On Language and Art The residency brought together a community of thirty international artists who integrate language with contemporary visual art practice. His residency was supported by a fellowship from the Banff Centre and a grant from the Illinois Arts Council.

Lingering Presence, Barbara McDonnell’s spring 2006 show at the Ellen Curlee Gallery in St. Louis, featured interior imagery from her father’s house before it was demolished. McDonnell will show her Landfill images at the Sheldon Art Gallery and images from her MPP collection at the College of DuPage in January 2007.

The entire set of 50 images from Sybil Miller’s Statesmen series is on is on exhibit at Oresmann Gallery, (Smith College, Northampton, MA) through December 1.

Kathy Richland Pick is a recipient of a National Museum of Women in the Arts grant, presented by the museum’s Illinois State Committee.

Melissa Ann Pinney is now represented in New York by the Alan Klotz Gallery in Chelsea, in addition to the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago. Her work is included on the Photography Now DVD, an international survey featuring 1200 photographs and audio commentary culled from 1300 submissions from 60 countries by a panel from Japan, Europe and the U.S.

Colleen Plumb was selected for Photography Now: 100 Portfolios and received a 2006 CAAP grant.

Denis Roussel’s work was shown in September 2006 in The Scientific Esthetic, a solo exhibition at the Alliance Francaise de Denver in Denver, CO. Roussel also presented the project at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and in conjunction with the exhibition Body Worlds 2.

Dona Schwartz had a recent solo show, In the Kitchen, at Blue Sky Gallery, Portland, OR in May 2006 and has shown work in several group exhibitions including the Pingyao International Photography Festival in Pingyao, China; Selbstsicht—der Schritt ins Bild, Darmstädter Tage der Fotografie, Darmstädt, Germany; and Domestic Diaries at the Rockford Art Museum, guest-curated by MOCP’s Karen Irvine. Her work has been collected by the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX; and the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR. Shwartz won the 2006 Griffin Award, Griffin Museum of Photography.

Sarah Faust Waddell was included in the 18th Evanston + Vicinity Biennial 2006 at the Evanston Art Center; was a 2005 recipient of an Illinois Arts Council grant, and was featured in Domestic Diaries at the Rockford Museum of Art.

Brian Ulrich has 3 upcoming solo shows: Thrift at Rhona Hoffman Gallery (Dec 1, 2006 - Jan 6, 2007); Copia at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (Dec 2006 - May 2007); and Julie Saul Gallery, NYC (Jan 4 - Feb 10, 2007). His Chicago gallerist, Rhona Hoffman, will show his work to the Art Basel Miami fair, and an interview with Ulrich and review of the MP3 books appears in the forthcoming issue of Photo-Eye magazine.

MPP artists or their representatives are encouraged to email their news (50 words or less, with web links if applicable) to MoCP Web Administrator
Audrey Mast at audrey_michelle[at]comcast.net.

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