Value City 2008
Born in 1971, Guggenheim Fellowship Award recipient in 2009, Brian Ulrich was our visiting artist today. Born in Northport, New York, Ulrich now lives in Chicago, Illinois and has been shown in several museums and galleries. He has work held in the collections at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.
Ulrich began his presentation with an audio clip recorded on site of his new/current work. That collection is titled “Dark Stores, Ghostboxes, and Dead Malls”. Shot with an 8x10 film camera, Ulrich captures abandoned retail locations at night with long exposures. His reason for playing the audio recording was to give us audience some insight into what kind of people he has run ins with while being on shoot at these abandoned spots late at night.
He moved his presentation back several years after playing the audio recording to discuss his first collection/project titled “Copia” that he began shortly after 9/11 in 2001. After the planes hit the twin towers, Ulrich said that all he wanted to do was connect with people and figure out a way to capture with the camera that emotional moment. Taken from the lecture write up “In response to a national call for citizens to bolster the American Economy through shopping,” Ulrich bases his work heavily on visual language in all these retail locations. I felt that that statement may have been too evident because he seemed to only skim the surface of all his images. He never really got down to the center core of his concept. I felt as though all of his comments were solely explaining what we were looking at in the simplest terms. That was one thing that disappointed me about this lecture when I compare how much I was able to grasp from Penelope Umbrico’s lecture and really see how each of her projects streamlined right into the next. I felt as though Ulrich was choppy and his presentation seemed random.
At the second half of his lecture when he started going into his new stuff, I felt more interested and inclined to listen to what he had to say about these images. I was secretly hoping he would reveal his secrets and really dig deep into why he was doing this.
artist website
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