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Memory Formation

Samira Yamin

Aug 10th, 2023—Oct 9th, 2023
OPENING RECEPTION Thursday, Aug 10th, 6—8pm

Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 2 PM—6 PM. Admission is free.
To schedule an appointment, please click here.

NEW YORK, NY (August 10th, 2023) — Penumbra Foundation is pleased to present Memory Formation, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Samira Yamin of 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.

A continuation of Yamin’s artistic practice of image appropriation and the simulacral construction of one’s identity and connections to people and places constrained by geopolitics and war, Memory Formation extends into deeply intimate terrority in her use of photographs and negatives recovered after the death of her paternal grandparents. Since that event, which limited Yamin’s access and relationship to the past, she began to question whether there was something to be gleaned from these static images, whether her connection to them could go beyond genetic similarities, beyond the biological. 

Each print is a single exposure in which the light that begins in the enlarger passes through the negative, then through water, displacing parts of the image before it lands on the page as a pictorial and performative formation. The elastic energy of bodies and lines in the prints starkly contrast to the negatives they are made from. Degraded and worn by time, they are evidence of the amateur photographer who made them, and the nature of how the images arrived to Yamin. This fragile materiality is both the archive and the content. 

In the space between the negative and the paper, Yamin creates a temporal and kinetic meeting place between her and her grandfather, trying to locate a moment ordinarily prohibited in time and space by actively participating in making an image of and from the past. These acts of fluid dynamics extend gesture, transforming it from an action with a distinct beginning and end into one of continuity: we don’t touch things so much as we move through them.

About the artist

Samira Yamin
Samira Yamin has had solo exhibitions of her work at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (now ICALA), Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and PATRON Gallery and has been included in numerous group exhibitions including the Craft and Folk Art Museum (now Craft Contemporary), Camera Club of New York, Metropolitan State University Denver and San Francisco State University. A recipient of grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, California Community Foundation and Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Yamin has been an Artist in Residence at the Rauschenberg Residency, Headlands Center for the Arts, Penumbra Foundation, Djerassi Resident Artists Program and Galveston Artist Residency. Yamin received an MFA from UC Irvine and BAs in Art and Sociology from UCLA.

samirayamin.com

This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.

About Penumbra Project Gallery
The 300 square-foot Project Gallery offers emerging and mid-career artists a place to present new work. The exhibitions are developed in conjunction with Penumbra’s editorial or educational programming.  

About Penumbra Foundation
Penumbra Foundation is a non-profit organization that brings together the Art and Science of Photography through education, research, outreach, public and residency programs. Its goal is to be a comprehensive resource for photographers at any level, artists, students, professionals, historians, researchers, conservators and curators.  Penumbra specializes in advancing the use of historic and alternative photographic technologies for contemporary image-making.  

The Penumbra Project Gallery is generously supported by the Jacques & Natasha Gelman Foundation and Joy of Giving Something.