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MoCP Newsletter
November 11, 2007
MoCP.org has a new look!
We’ve been working with Neoteric Design and Columbia College Chicago’s Creative and Printing Services to develop a fresh new look for MoCP.org. A hearty thanks to the staff at CPS, as well as Nick Gracilla, Sonia Yoon, and Travis Mandrell at Neoteric for their patience, expertise, and vision. Tell us what you think!
Recent Acquisitions
New additions to the Permanent Collection at MoCP include works by Robert Heinecken, New Catalogue, Simon Norfolk, Binh Danh, KayLynn Deveney, Judy Fiskin, Aleksandra Vajd, Saul Leiter, Alice Wells, John Willis, and Tom Young.
A few highlights:
New Catalogue, A. Hitler and D. Eckart Obersalzburg to Hoher Goll No. 1, 2003-05, C-print
New Catalogue (a.k.a. Luke Batten and Jonathan Sadler) New Catalogue was conceived as a “mock stock” catalogue showcasing decidedly non-commercial imagery. The team produces series that retain the crisp look of stock photography while inserting subjects that subvert the traditional uses of such imagery. The series A. Hitler and D. Eckart: Obersaltzberg to Hoher Goll concerns Obersalzberg, a mountainside near Berchtesgaden in the German Alps. It calls attention to the reconstruction and re-appropriation of a place burdened with historically weighty events. More…
Robert Heinecken, Multiple Solution Puzzle, 1965
Robert Heinecken (American, 1931-2006), who is perhaps best known for his assemblages of found images from torn magazine pages and for photographs containing familiar media iconography, continually redefined the role of photographer and perceptions of photography as an art medium. Trained in design, drawing, and printmaking, Heinecken’s signature work incorporates public images (from magazines, newspapers, and television) and his own darkroom activity which changes the interpretation of the original images. Though Heinecken is rarely behind the lens of a camera, his process is faithfully photographic. Yet he is often discussed less in terms of photography and more in terms of conceptual art. To put a name to Heinecken’s unique combination of interests and technique, he was dubbed a “photographist” by philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto who described the responsibility of the modern artist as “creating art that functions in part as a philosophical reflection of its own nature.” More…
Beate Gütschow Lectures at MoCP
Artist Beate Gütschow’s two main bodies of work are on view now at the MoCP: the first, LS, consisting of landscapes, were made from 1999 to 2003, and the second, S, consists of black-and-white urban landscapes. The MoCP and Aperture have co-published a book, Beate Gütschow: LS/S, available now.
The artist presented a lecture to a packed Ferguson Hall at Columbia College Chicago at the opening of LS/S on October 25, 2007.
Beate Gütschow was born in 1970 in Mainz, Germany and grew up in Hamburg. She studied fine arts in Oslo, Norway and later at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg, where she studied with Bernhard Blume and Wolfgang Tillmans. After graduating, Gütschow moved to Los Angeles and than to Berlin, where she is now based.
Gütschow’s pictures are montages: photographic compositions made up of a large number of different parts, with each work comprising 20 to 80 different elements. She shoots the source images herself and uses Photoshop to construct the final images. “To find the motifs I visit suburban locations all over the world,” Gütschow describes. “Two years ago I did a trip to the Balkans. I was especially interested in the opulent, but now completely run-down, 1970s Socialist architecture there. Berlin with its Socialist past also offers good conditions to shoot source images…Wherever I go, I always have my photo equipment with me.”
Beate Gütschow, S #2, 2005
Gütschow uses analog cameras to photograph her source material, choosing the format according to how large she wants each element to appear in the final picture. “I shoot the basic material early in the morning to get a smooth light,” she adds. “I always use the same film and ASA. That makes sure that the pieces fit together in the final photo.”
Back in Berlin, Gütschow archives and digitizes these photographs. Her archive now contains many thousands of images, and she selects files from this store to compose her works. “I often begin with a small detail, an architectural feature that I find particularly interesting, and then I build the picture around it piece by piece,” she says. In Photoshop, she only uses photographic tools to change the brightness and contrast, but she doesn’t use painting tools – the photographic surface remains intact and the grain is consistent. “Although the final image seems to be a normal photograph, right down to the last detail, as a whole the photo seems unreliable,” Gütschow notes. Using combination of different camera angles means that “a curious form of architecture is created,” the artist says. “Fragments from different times and contexts are merged…The architecture is removed from its context; it is detached from the history of style, and then reworked.”
Beate Gütschow, LS #13, 2005
She adds: “I aim to create a state of uncertainty, where it isn’t clear what is being shown. My photographs cannot be attributed to any particular reality, a specific place or country – they have no equivalent in the outside world.” Gütschow notes that digital processes are only a phase in her work. “Digital photography is the phase in which I edit my analog source material using Photoshop. The term ‘digital photography’ can also be used in the sense of taking photographs with a digital camera, but that is not what I am talking about here. I decided to use analog cameras to capture the source material for quality reasons: in the late 1990s the resolution of digital cameras wasn’t very good. And later I continued to work in this way because I didn’t want to lose the visible grain in my photographs…it was as if a photograph with visible grain were somehow ‘truer’.”
Beate Gütschow, LS #3, 2005
In her landscape works, Gütschow reconstructed landscape paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries with photography. Inspired by artists such as Claude Lorrain, Jacob van Ruisdael, Joseph Vernet, John Constable, she reproduced their arrangements, compositions and the use of light using the same analog-to-digital process. “In the 17th and 18th centuries the representation of landscape was idealized and obeyed strict rules,” she says. “Even then, real landscapes did not look the way they were portrayed in paintings. Painters then did the same thing I do now: they composed the depicted scenes from a selection of set pieces – sketched images they had captured in nature.”
Gütschow observes that the relationship between representation and what is represented has interested her for a long time. She asks: “Why do we want to represent something? How much reality can be conveyed in a photograph? My images do not show real situations, but I nevertheless use photography, a medium that cannot exist without the representation of reality…How does digital photography differ from analog photography?”
She notes that in montaged images there is no single time or place where the shot was taken. “Fragments of reality can be combined freely without this being visible in the final image,” she says. “The photograph has nothing to do with the reality on which it is based, but there is nevertheless an old expectation, dating back to the days of analog photography, that the photographic surface represents reality. I use the tension arising from this discrepancy in my work as a way of directing the viewer’s gaze towards the conditions of the photographic medium. My aim is to reflect the distinction between representation and reality.”
––From the artist’s lecture at the MoCP, October 25, 2007
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 2005, it includes over 1,000 photographs by 75 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.
Recent accomplishments by MPP artists include…
Jennifer Greenburg, The Kawals, 2004
A full-length book of Jennifer Greenburg’s The Rockabillies is currently in the process of being published by The Center for American Places. Greenburg received an Illinois Arts Council Grant in addition to a CAAP (Community Arts Assistance Program) this year. She also held solo shows at The Richmond Public Library, Richmond, VA, and at The Latin School of Chicago. She was awarded Curator’s Choice at The Chicago Art Open and will be participating in a pin-up show in conjunction with A Field Guide, (Mark Batty Publishing) this December in New York City.
Larry Chait’s photograph, sun04011334, part of his Motion and Memory series, won first place in 12 12 Gallery’s national juried photography exhibition, curated by Brian Paul Clamp of CLAMPART Gallery in NYC.
Nate Larson recently showed his work in a solo exhibition at the Packer Schopf Gallery in Chicago and a two-person exhibition at La Casa de las Conchas Cultural Center in Salamanca, Spain. He has also participated in group exhibitions at the Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art in Colorado, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and the Noorderlicht Photofestival Act of Faith in the Netherlands. He received the 2007 Digital Photography Grant Award from the Ultimate Eye Foundation. He was an artist-in-residence at Visual Studies Workshop in the summer of 2007 and his artist book “Dream Self” is forthcoming from Visual Studies Workshop Press.
Bird Watching, (Dark Eyed Junco), 2003
Paula McCartney received a 2007/2008 McKnight Photography Fellowship and is now represented by KlompChing Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Her artists’ book, Bird Watching, was acquired by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Rochester Institute of Technology, in Rochester, NY.
Amber Hawk Swanson’s recent and upcoming venues include a May 2008 solo show
at Locust Projects in Miami and a November 2007 show at Latitude 53 in Canada. Her video work recently screened as part of The Cowboy and The Pegasus at Queer Fest Midwest and Diamonds at Dusk, both in Chicago. Recently, Swanson was profiled on CurrentTV, in an episode dedicated to her current work, Doll Life, as well as in an episode of CLTV’s Metromix and in a broadcast piece/live interview for Vocalo.org. She was interviewed on The Obscure News in a piece that was re-broadcast on Chicago Public Radio’s Re:Sound and an interview on the subject of her current work will also appear on a forthcoming episode of SexTV from Toronto’s CTV. Additionally, Amber Hawk Swanson is featured in several recent print articles, including articles in the Associated Press, the Chicago Reader, SABAH, a daily Turkish newspaper, and Chill magazine.
Brian Ulrich, Chicago, IL, 2003
Brian Ulrich’s work was designated as a Critic’s Pick, in the November issue of ArtNews magazine. A review of the Stalking Suburbia exhibit at the Westport Arts Center appeared in the September 30 issue of the New York Times. Ulrich participated in a group exhibit at Galerie f5.6 in Munich, Germany, Chicagraphy, which opened in September, exhibiting with his friends Jon Gitelson and Matt Siber. His work is currently on view at the Montserrat College of Art through February 2 and the Photographic Resource Center, Boston, MA through January 27. Ulrich has lectured at East Tennessee St. University, the Myers School of Art in OH, and the Photoshelter tour in Chicago, and done editorial work for Conde Nast Portfolio and The New York Times Magazine.
Sarah Hoskins received a grant from the John Anson Kittredge Educational Fund in support of her documentary photography work. Russian Esquire magazine asked her to review photographs from the online site Flickr for their December 2006 publication.
Dona Schwartz’s new series, On the Nest, was one of the 60 images selected from nearly 7,000 submissions for The Photographic Portrait Prize 2007 at National Portrait Gallery, London, UK. She participated in the Spectra ‘07 National Photography Triennial, Silvermine Guild Art Center, juried by Peter MacGill; Kinsey Confidential at the Kinsey Institute Gallery, Indiana University; and Expressive Bodies: Contemporary Art Photography from the Kinsey Institute, Herron Gallery, Indianapolis, IN, among many other recent exhibitions. She recently received an Honorable Mention in Photography Now ‘07at the Center for Photography at Woodstock; and Jurors’ Selections at Transformations, Fotofest 2008 and Interactions at the Center for Fine Art Photography. Her work has appeared in print in Camera Arts, Minnesota’s Creative Quarterly, Profifoto, Popular Photography, and on mnartists.org.
Taxidermy Shop, Casper, Wyoming, 2004
During September and October, Roland Miller had a solo exhibition of his Real West photographs at the Livingston Lord Library at Minnesota State University, Moorhead. He was also a guest artist at Pensacola Junior College in October.
Marc Hauseris traveling to China in December, the first of six trips in the next year. He has been commissioned by the Chinese government to photograph portraits of the Olympic Committee and Chinese Diplomats. He also has a solo exhbition, Sinners, Storytellers & Socialites, running through December 31 at Chicago Art Source Gallery.
Colleen Plumb had a recent solo exhibit at the Notebaert Nature, Museum in Chicago. Her work has been published this year in A Field Guide to the North, American Family, by Garth Risk Hallberg, and Light and Lens: Photography in the Digital Age, edited by Robert Hirsh. Plumb received a Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs CAAP Grant and will be having a solo exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in 2008.
Melissa Ann Pinney recently had a solo show, Recent Work, at the Klotz Gallery in New York that closed in July. O Magazine published my her in the August and September issues. Pinney’s photographs are featured in three group shows and one exhibition catalogue this season: Male & Female: Gender Performed in Photographs from the George Eastman House Collection, and Presumed Innocence at the De Cordova Museum, an exhibition of photographs of children selected from the collection of Anthony and Beth Terrana, on view February 2 – April 27, 2008. She is also participating in the upcoming group show, Girls on the Verge, at the Art Institute of Chicago, opening December 8. Pinney and her daughter Emma will speak at AIC’s Photo Society in February.
Ones to Watch
With Rod Slemmons
Curtis Mann
Curtis Mann came to Columbia College Chicago as a photography graduate student in 2006. He quickly established himself as one of the most innovative users of the medium in the school. I was attracted to his physical abuse of the conventional print—with bleach and/or abrasion—because at the Museum of Contemporary Photography we have been working on an exhibition addressing the limits of photographic credibility.
Curtis Mann
How little needs to remain to convince us? Why do we still have such a pathological confidence in the ability of the photograph to tell us the truth? What kinds of truth is it really telling us? Curtis has taken this a bit further, wondering how we can accommodate so easily the radical scale shifts within photographic images. When he isolates figures of people by eliminating their context, for example, they always seem way too small.
I am also interested in this work because it qualifies and questions the ongoing fear of digital manipulation and reminds us that photography is, and has always been the most malleable of media to begin with. We don’t need no digital badges in that respect.
Curtis Mann
Curtis takes the perception based photographic image, however initially produced, back into the manually based realm of painting and gives himself more room for visual play, arriving at metaphoric rather than purely visual conclusions.
Recently Curtis was included in a group show at the Silverstein Gallery in New York. He is also the recipient of the Weisman Scholarship and the Crystal Apple Award at the 2006 National Conference of the Society for Photographic Education here in Chicago.
Permanent Collection Spotlight: Paul Shambroom
Minnesota-based MoCP Permanent Collection artist Paul Shambroom is presenting a lecture on November 29 as part of Columbia College Chicago Photography Department’s Lectures in Photography series.
Shambroom’s describes his current project as follows:
“…photographing training facilities, equipment and personnel involved in the massive government and private sector efforts to prepare for and respond to terrorist attacks within the nation’s borders. First responders and law enforcement officers train in large-scale simulated environments such as “Disaster City” in Texas and “Terror Town”, an abandoned mining community in New Mexico purchased with funds from the Department of Homeland Security. This work examines issues of fear, safety and liberty in post-9/11 America.”
Paul Shambroom, Untitled (Ohio class Trident submarine, USS Alaska in dry dock for refit, Bangor Naval Submarine Base, Washington), 1992
Shambroom spent the greater part of the 1980s and 90s creating two series of photographs, both of which document specific, uniquely American manifestations of political action. The first, Nuclear Weapons (1989-2001), presents the highest and most hidden levels of power in the United States by documenting the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal.
Paul Shambroom, Markle, IN (pop. 1,228) Town Council, 7/21/99, 1999
The second, Meetings (1999-2003), is a study of grass-roots democracy in action – elected civic leaders interacting at municipal and community meetings throughout the United States. These two series, though seemingly at separate ends of an abstract spectrum of power, raise questions, when considered together, about the disjuncture between local action and federal process. As far as they exist as documents, Shambroom’s photographs provide us with visual access to restricted, out-of-the-way places. Although it is tempting to reduce the poles of power represented in the two series into binary oppositions of anonymity/specificity, abstract/specific, and powerful/weak, these are overly simplified readings. Shambroom questions the illusion of hierarchies of power, and ultimately posits a more optimistic possibility: that power and responsibility exists in the individual, whether within, in spite of, or parallel to totalizing discourses. In this respect, Shambroom’s work can be read as a provocative call for personal and collective change. More…
-from the MoCP.org Permanent Collection site and Paul Shambroom