Field notes from Unseen California
Aspen Mays, Dionne Lee, Karolina Karlic, Mercedes Dorame and Tarrah Krajnak

October 19, 2023 — January 2, 2024

Field notes from Unseen California is a group exhibition by the inaugural cohort of the arts research initiative Unseen California. Beginning in 2021, the five artists engaged with the public land of the University of California Natural Reserve System and each other through shared dialogues and personal projects developed from research at the reserves, proposing new epistemologies and ways of belonging with the natural world.

Sun, Moon, Egg
Keren Moscovitch

Feb 16th—May 1st, 2023

Known for her largely collaborative and relational practice exploring intimacy and sexuality through physical, linguistic and relational interventions and documentations, Sun, Moon, Egg considers relationality on a more internal level. The cyanotypes evoke both celestial forms, which have historically been perceived as intertwined with the reproductive cycle, and an imagined interiority of the body.

Cinebooks
Tine Guns

Nov 17th, 2022—Feb 6th, 2023

Tine Guns is an artist who uses mediums such as film, photobooks and installations to explore perception, memory, and the fragmented notion of time in the human experience. In recent years she has searched for ways to translate sequencing methods from cinematic montage into the artistic practice of the contemporary photobook. Cinebooks gives a first overview of these books.

Obras
Sophie Barbasch

Sept 22nd—Nov 7th, 2022

Awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, Barbasch lived in Fortaleza, Brazil for a year, photographing the Transnordestina, a railroad under construction in the Northeast that ties the desert to the sea. Traveling throughout Ceará, Piauí, and Pernambuco, Barbasch explored a country in a persistent state of flux. This project stemmed from both intellectual curiosity and a personal connection: introduced to Brazil at a young age by her stepmother, she made frequent visits to the country, growing familiar with its language and culture, all the while wondering if she was an insider or an outsider.

the flowers aren’t growing, the eggs are hatching, it’s almost dawn
Dylan Hausthor

July 11th—Sept 12th, 2022

‘I was recently visiting my hometown and stopped to fill up my car with gas. I noticed a woman sitting outside the gas station drinking coffee and recognized her as my old ballet teacher. I sat down next to her and we caught up. She had been going blind for the decade since I last saw her. She had fallen out of love, started growing a garden, and found god. She had a small collection of freshly picked mushrooms next to her and handed me one, saying “mushrooms have no gender, did you know that?”’ 

Reimaging Likeness and Landscape
Lisa di Donato, Vivian Galban, Myra Greene, Galina Kurlat, Vanessa Marsh, Lindsey Ross

Curated by Joni Sternbach

March 31st—July 1st, 2022

As photography continues to evolve from explicit renderings to the imagined and undepicted, new representations of landscapes and human figures emerge. The collodion process, invented in 1851, is this exhibition's connecting thread. The selected works reveal the different ways in which contemporary artists expand and/or challenge the pictorial conventions, history, materiality and narrative possibilities of wet plate photography.

ARRAY
Martyna Szczęsna

February 17th, 2022—March 23rd, 2022

Szczesna's work examines utopian constructs using both the formal and intangible qualities of photography and site. In Array, her ongoing series of life-sized photograms, Szczesna maps chance urban ecologies created in the interplay between the artificial illumination of L.E.D. streetlights and the projected shadows of trees reorganized according to the logic of the light source's cellular, technological structure.

27 Seconds
Tine Guns, Dea Kulumbegashvili, Yana Kononova, Sara J. Winston

Curated by Jenia Fridlyand

November 4th—December 23rd, 2021

A photograph is made at a specific moment, but the resulting image begins to inhabit its own period of time, when beheld by a viewer.  What happens, then, when two or more photographs are viewed next to each other?  A group of images may be related by location and subject matter, as well as the photographer’s aesthetic choices and conceptual design. All of these relationships impact the viewer’s perception of time in complicated ways, warping its flow during the viewing experience. In this exhibition, four artists are probing that complexity, each with a particular group of still images.

Hold Fast
Christine Elfman

August 19th—October 15th, 2021

The exhibition is an experiment in photographic duration and visibility, featuring rocks and plaster cast fragments as subject matter. Impermanent photographs made by fading lichen dyed paper in the sun are exhibited alongside silver gelatin prints through a range of presentation methods that explore the extremes of surrender and preservation. The installation invites viewers to consider their relationship to change and the unknown, to negotiate loss and security through the medium of photography.

For Mama Adama
Adama Delphine Fawundu

July 1st—August 8th, 2021

In these works, Fawundu appropriates motifs found on her grandmother's fabrics and transforms them into patterns of exploration. Experimenting with color, form, scale and surface and using textiles, papers and different photo-graphic processes, Fawundu examines the relationship between materiality and identity. 

Scene in a Library
Mary Ellen Bartley

May 6th—June 21st, 2021

In 2019, Bartley spent six weeks at Penumbra making hundreds of prints, using a toner-based copier machine. All images were forged using the Taubman collection of 19th and early 20th century photographic manuals, treatises, and monographs, housed at the Foundation’s location in New York City.

What’s Your Name When You’re at Home?
Group exhibition curated by Sabrina Mandanici

February 23rd— April 26th, 2021

Participating artists: Marina Berio, Laura Carrascosa Vela, Natacha Ebers, Mariceu Erthal García, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Ana Lucia Mariz, Jenny Irene Miller, Ahndraya Parlato, Dina Oganova, Sophie Schwartz, Maria Sturm and Cemre Yeşil Gönenli.

Real Spaces
Robin Crookall

December 8th, 2020—January 30th, 2021

Real Spaces reimagines the interstices of domestic and urban spaces with nods to the history of photography. Contrasting photographic imposters with contrived images, this series consists of models that portray similar subjects explored by renowned artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark, Lee Friedlander and Robert Adams.

Past Paper // Present Marks: Responding to Rauschenberg
Jennifer Garza-Cuen & Odette England

October 20th— November 30th, 2020

In 2018, Jennifer Garza-Cuen and Odette England spent a week at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency in Captiva, Florida, collaborating on a series of nearly 200 photograms.

(un)objectively
Rachelle Bussières

September 17th— October 15th, 2020

Rooted in both photography and sculpture, Rachelle Bussières’s practice revolves around the interaction of mediums, with each work becoming the product of a synergistic approach.