Suns From Flickr
Embarrassing Books
Mirrors
Image Collection # 4 "Instances of Casually Flung Clothing" 2007
The second artist lecture I attended was Penelope Umbrico who was part of the Photo and Film Department’s Visiting Artist Series. Photographer and sculptor, Penelope Umbrico, earned a BFA from Ontario College of Art in Canada and a MFA from the School of Visual Arts in NY where she currently lives and works. She is the recipient of the Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant in 2008, the Harvestworks Scholar Residency award in 2008, and in 2002 she was the recipient of the New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship Grant that spring. She has public and private collections in museums such as the International Center of Photography in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art also in New York, the Museum of Modern Art, the Rhizome Art Base, and the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida.
During her lecture she spoke a lot about how her inspiration and ideas for all of her on going pieces come from magazines, catalogs, websites such as Flickr, and other media that tend to bombard the public with repetitive knowledge. She started her lecture out by explaining one of her oldest pieces that began right around the time of 9/11. She was currently living and working in NYC and her father called her and asked her to search Ebay for a specific dish. She became so addicted to “the search” that she started collecting all different shapes, sizes, and colored dishes off of Ebay and photographed each of them individually. She created a digital animation project with all of these photographs of the dishes. However, at that point it was risky to be receiving packages in the mail from strangers because of the anthrax scare right after 9/11. This process almost became thrilling and quite a rollercoaster ride.
Umbrico spoke about how she has always had an interest in catalogs and home repair magazines from places like Lowe’s and Home Depot that she began really studying them, their imagery, and their fictional characters. She talked about these home catalogs that are sent to you begin to invade your space. For example one of the projects she created out of this was one involving mirrors and how with out mirrors around she was getting a feeling of disappearance. She began looking at the placement of mirrors in spaces/rooms in the catalogs of home and living and made sculptures of mirrors by scanning the mirror images from the catalogs and printing them to actual size. The last part to her piece was taking all these prints of mirrors and mounting them onto plexi-glass and hanging them as “fake mirrors” on the gallery walls all together.
Her Flickr suns piece was one that I thought not only visually pleased the audience but it also quietly said a lot just being static on the wall of a gallery. Horizons, places one can never get or reach, are what were depicted in these romantic Honeymoon brochures she got her initial inspiration from. All of these aesthetically pleasing sunsets printed in this book enticing newlyweds to come visit here! Because of those horizons and sunsets from the brochures, she took to the internet and researched how many hits she could get when putting in the word sunset into the Flickr image engine. She downloaded 2,350 images of suns from different peoples flickr sites, cropped them, made them her own, and created an installation of 2,350 "gorgeous" sunsets. She showed this installation at the New York Photo Festival and it was titled "541,795 Sunsets on Flickr on 12/03/06". Each time she installed this piece into a new gallery space, she would check the number of hits on Flickr for sunsets and would change the number in the title of the work.
Penelope Umbrico's Artist Website
Arrythmia Digital Project
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