PROJECT GALLERY | Past Exhibitions
Overclouded
Leah Beeferman
November 21st, 2024 – February 9th, 2025
Fascinated by the complexity and elusiveness of recording the visible effects of an invisible atmosphere on a landscape, Beeferman combines photographic and scientific imagery in multilayered photographic prints, 3D scenes, CNC and laser-etched aluminum panels, and videos, exploring the representation of earthly phenomena.
a ll i ll w i ll
Sandra Erbacher
September 19th – November 9th, 2024
Established by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the Eugenics Record Office gathered biological and social information about the ancestry of the American population, such as inborn physical, mental, and temperamental traits. Erbacher’s work engages with the collection on different levels, considering the structure of the archive housing the documents by analyzing its rules, organizing principles and function, in this case, to promote the idea of race-betterment and the influence of government policy on matters of immigration restriction and sterilization - the legacy of which can still be felt today.
Dream as it falls in the Eye, in Water, in Mirrors
Yasi Alipour
June 6th, 2024 — August 26th, 2024
Drawing connections between mathematics, art, and language, Alipour folds and unfolds papers in recursive choreographies to create intricate geometric forms that transcend the logic and rules that generate them.
What happens when an idea, an image, or a dream is mirrored? A reverse image, a mirrored image, is formed in the shifting of a language or of a position, and instead of light or reality, a photograph can be about that process of reversal.
More than I could ask
Dawn Kim
March 9th — May 3rd, 2024
Sequestered in their everyday lives, Dawn Kim’s subjects are encountered in their in-between moments at work and rest.
Made with a 4x5 view camera, her photographs explore the visual language of portraiture across a broad range of people and places, employing different approaches in form, tone, and genre.
Field notes from Unseen California
Aspen Mays, Dionne Lee, Karolina Karlic, Mercedes Dorame and Tarrah Krajnak
Curated by Aspen Mays
October 19, 2023 — January 2, 2024
Beginning in 2021, the five artists– Aspen Mays, Dionne Lee, Karolina Karlic, Mercedes Dorame and Tarrah Krajnak, have 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. In their ongoing interdisciplinary work, exhibited for the first time, the artists of Unseen California respond to the role photography has played in defining attitudes toward the iconic Western landscape by its omission of multi-valent histories embedded in the land.
Memory Formation
Samira Yamin
Aug 10th, 2023 — Oct 9th, 2023
Memory Formation, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Samira Yamin, presents unique and experimental images made from black and white negatives of her paternal grandfather, a gymnast in 1950s Iran, in which Yamin uses the physics of photography to come into a dynamic relationship with a man she would meet only once in her life, forming a single memory of him.
Lost in Transmission
Lucy Helton with Jason Geistweidt
Jun 8th—July 31st, 2023
Consisting of works from over three years of Helton’s research on environmental transformation and fascination with basic image transmission using low-energy radio waves, and the mixed-media installation QSL, done in collaboration with Geistweidt, the exhibition utilizes radiofax, SSTV (slow-scan television), and HAM radio, to communicate and build data and images concerning time, communication, local weather patterns, and climate change.
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.