PRESS RELEASE | 2021

Penumbra Foundation is pleased to announce the 2021 Workspace Program artists.

The 2021 jury included Pradeep Dalal (Artist, Educator and Director of the Creative Capital/ Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Program, New York), Maria Martinez-Cañas (Artist and Educator, Miami) and Milagros de la Torre (Artist, New York).

Penumbra Foundation would like to earnestly thank all of the artists who applied this year, and we hope that those whose work was not selected at this time will continue to apply to the Workspace Program in the future.

SPONSORS

This program is supported by The Henry Nias Foundation, The Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation and Roz Leibowitz. 

Thanks to the following artists for their support to Penumbra Foundation and in particular to the 2021 Penumbra Workspace Program:

Elizabeth Albright, Sophie Barbasch, Mary Ellen Bartley, Marina Berio, Geoffrey Berliner, Tim Carpenter, Lois Conner, Dillon DeWaters, Lisa Di Donato, Christine Elfman, Odette England, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Arash Fewzee, Larry Fink, Jenia Fridlyand, Vivian Galban, Theresa Ganz, Lucy Helton, Alan Huck, Kevin Kunstadt, Ruth Lauer-Manenti, Aspen Mays, Raymond Meeks, Michael Page Miller, Andrew Moore, Ian Lewandowski, Jolene Lupo, Tasha Lutek, Arthur Ou, Sarah Palmer, Ahndraya Parlato, Emma Phillips, Liz Sales, Molly Rapp, David Rothenberg, Victoria Sambunaris, Sophie Schwartz, Griffin Shapiro, Joni Sternbach, Olivia Walsh, James Welling and Jeffrey Whetstone

Daveed Baptiste

The super inventive staged portraits by David Baptiste were thrilling to behold. The mashup between Haitian and African American culture - church, rap music, disposable material culture, portraits of JFK, Malcolm and Jesus adorning walls, and the delirious array of textiles printed with his own patterns - all very promising for the expansion of this project with Penumbra's large plotters and studio space.

–Pradeep Dalal (Artist, Educator, Member of the 2021 Jury).

Daveed Baptiste is a multidisciplinary maker working in fashion design, photography, and textiles. His migration from Haiti to America inspires all of his work. As an immigrant and queer person, his work examines the multidimensional identities of the Caribbean diaspora living in the United States. Through collaborative projects and various mediums, his work aims to decolonize notions of race, gender, and class within the Haitian community and greater Caribbean diaspora.

He is a recent Parsons graduate with a BFA in Fashion Design. His photographs have been published in The New Yorker and VOGUE, and he has exhibited at Red Hook Labs and Aperture. He is a 2020 Lakou NOU Resident at the Haiti Cultural Exchange.

https://www.daveedb.com/

Sophie Barbasch

Through Sophie’s work, we are witness to a very intimate connection between her and her subject. There is an ambiguity in these images, and we are left with little to no answers, but with a visual vocabulary of isolation and beauty, where the subjects' gestures and body language are our only link into his world.

–Milagros de la Torre (Artist, Member of the 2021 Jury).

Sophie Barbasch is a New York based photographer. She earned her MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BA in Art and Art History from Brown University. Selected grants and residencies include the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Blue Mountain Center, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil.

https://www.sophiebarbasch.com/

DylaN Hausthor (Portland, Me)

In Dylan Hausthor's work, we are submerged in a parallel universe of otherness between what we see and what we imagine. His images place us halfway of something about to happen or that just happened, and his generous black-and-white language pushes photography’s register to its extreme boundaries; in an effort to show us both, its potentials and its pretense - all made with delicacy.

–Milagros de la Torre (Artist, Member of the 2021 Jury).

Dylan Hausthor is an artist based in New England. Their work is an act of hybridity–an effort to render field recordings into myth. Interested in small-town gossip and the fragility of journalistic truth, they look for stories that are found at the end of dirt roads and in the tops of fir trees. They subscribe to emotional cohesiveness in their work and rely on vignettes, tangents, and tropes of conceptual art in their storytelling. Hausthor received their BFA from Maine College of Art and is a current MFA candidate at Yale University. Their work has been showcased nationally and internationally by the Aperture Foundation, British Journal of Photography, Photo District News, PHMuseum, Vice, Gomma, World Press Photo, LensCulture, Vogue, and the permanent collection at MoMA’s library. They are a 2019 recipient of a Nancy Graves fellowship for visual artists, runner-up for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, nominated for Prix Pictet 2021, a recipient of the Ellis-Beauregard grant and residency, and the winner of Burn Magazine’s Emerging Photographer’s Fund. They founded the art publication imprint Wilt Press in the spring of 2015, released their first trade edition monograph with Void Photo in 2019 with their collaborator Paul Guilmoth and currently works as a farmer.

http://www.dylanhausthor.com/

ALyssa Minahan (Boston, MA)

Alyssa Minahan’s work felt like a perfect fit for Penumbra’s WorkSpace Program. Her approach of dealing with personal experiences by challenging the notions of Photography and Sculpture is one that spoke to me. Can’t wait to see how this residency works for her.

–Maria Martinez-Cañas (Artist, Member of the 2021 Jury).

Alyssa Minahan utilizes photographic materials, including unfixed gelatin silver paper and large format negatives, in non-traditional ways to express ideas integral to the medium of photography, specifically its complex relationship to time, space and memory. In September 2019, Alyssa released NOTES, a handmade photo book published by Datz Press (Seoul, South Korea). NOTES is held in the collections of The New York Public Library, International Center for Photography Library, Amon Carter Museum of American Art Research Library, Stanford University Library, California College of the Arts Library and Massachusetts College of Art and Design Morton R. Godine Library. Alyssa has exhibited her work at numerous galleries and museums, including the Datz Museum of Art (Seoul, South Korea), Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, Arizona), Pingyao International Photography Festival (Shanxi, China), Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle, Washington) and Boston University Art Galleries (Boston, Massachusetts). In addition, her work has been featured in Harper's Magazine, Art New England and Phases Magazine. Alyssa is the recipient of the 2017 Massachusetts College of Art and Design Graduate Teaching Fellowship and is currently a Lecturer of Photography in the Department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College (Boston, MA).

http://www.alyssaminahan.com/

Rehan Miskci

Rehan’s methodology of juxtaposing personal and collective memory intrigued me. This is work that speaks of possibilities for the artist and the viewer – to be confronted and to be uncertain.

–Maria Martinez-Cañas (Artist, Member of the 2021 Jury).

Rehan Miskci (b. 1986, Istanbul) is a New York / Istanbul based visual artist working in photography, video and installation. She holds an undergraduate degree in Interior Architecture from Istanbul Technical University and an MFA in Photography, Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts, New York. She is the first place winner of Baxter Street Camera Club of New York’s Annual Competition in 2015. Her work has been exhibited in venues including Transmitter Gallery, Brooklyn, Fridman Gallery, New York, Kasa Gallery, Istanbul. Miskci is an alumna of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2019) and she is the recipient of the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace Fellowship (2019). Miskci was also awarded a NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) Fellowship in Photography (2019).

https://www.rehanmiskci.com/

Christie Neptune

I was moved by the beauty and power of Christie Neptune's striking self portraits and how sharply these were threaded with poignant images of a boarded up community center and an abandoned playground. I am eager to see the large format portraits of female immigrants from the Caribbean that she plans to make at Penumbra.

–Pradeep Dalal (Artist, Educator, Member of the 2021 Jury).

Christie Neptune holds a B.A. in Visual Arts from Fordham University. Her films and photography have been included in shows at BASS Museum, Miami, FL (2019); The University of Massachusetts Boston (2018); Rubber Factory, New York, NY (2017); A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn NY (2016); and Rutgers University (2015). Her work has been featured in publications including Artforum, NY Times, Hyperallergic, and The Washington Post. Neptune has been awarded the Bronx Museum of the Arts: Artist in Marketplace (AIM), Smack Mellon Studio Residency, NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Arts, and Light Work Artist-in-Residence among others. 

https://www.christieneptune.com/

Penumbra Foundation is pleased to announce the 2020 Workspace Program artists.

The 2020 jury included Monique Deschaines (Director of Euqinom Gallery, CA), Odette England (Artist and Educator, RI) and Arthur Ou (Artist and Educator, NY). In speaking to the selection process, the jurors had this to say:

Our selections reflect a careful evaluation of artistic ambition, clarity of statements and future plans, the developed sensitivity to the handling of materials (beyond technical skill alone), conceptual resonance, cultural significance, critical standpoint, artistic experimentation, and a willingness and ability to go beyond the boundaries of traditional process. [...]

In addition to selecting two US based workspace residents – and in lieu of selecting any internationally based artists this year – the Jury has instead suggested, with Penumbra Foundation's agreement, to select two additional NYC based artists for this year's program.

Penumbra Foundation would like to earnestly thank all of the artists who applied this year, and we hope that those whose work was not selected at this time will continue to apply to the Workspace Program in the future.

Scroll down for more information about each of the selected artists.

SPONSORS

This program is supported by The Henry Nias Foundation, The Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation and Roz Leibowitz. 

Thanks to the following artists for their support to Penumbra Foundation and in particular to the 2020 Penumbra Workspace Program:

Sophie Barbasch, Erica Baum, Marina Berio, Rachelle Bussières, Tim Carpenter, Dillon DeWaters, Larry Fink, Jenia Fridlyand, Theresa Ganz, Edward Grazda, Aspen Mays, Raymond Meeks, Andrew Moore, Adam Putnam, Meghann Riepenhoff, Almudena Romero, Liz Sales, Victoria Sambunaris, Victor Sira, Joni Sternbach, Eric Taubman, Pedro Weiner and Samira Yamin.

PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | NYC | 2020

ROBIN CROOKALL

Robin Crookall's intricate sculptural constructions, interpreted through the camera, reimagine interstitial spaces drawn from the domestic, the urban, as well as from the history of photography into subtle magical realities. The series, “Real Spaces,” is nearing the culminating stage, and the residency at Penumbra will provide support for the development of the work towards a hand-made book, making use of the array of post-production and book-making tools to realize the proposed endeavor. The jury was impressed with the consistency in vision with Crookall’s project and recognized the potential. We look forward to seeing the finished publication.

–Arthur Ou (Artist and Educator, Member of the 2020 Jury).

Robin Crookall came from Washington State to New York to pursue her Masters in Fine Arts. In 2016 she received her MFA, from New York University. There she continued to fine tune her sculpture and photography skills to create uncanny images of small scale architectural models. She uses the subject of the home or room because they are familiar and safe; underwhelming and routine, like an old lover. Surprises come in tiny increments, until suddenly the familiar becomes utterly unfamiliar. She creates a very particular kind of illusion from these photographed models. Not the big flashy kind where an elephant disappears right before your eyes. But the subtlety of the card counter, the slight of hand, and unnoticeable graceful dance of the pickpocketer. She is not a wizard, there is no real magic here. Sometimes the best tricks are the ones we don’t even see. Crookall is a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in photography from The New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2017, she participated in a group show at Seattle’s Soil Art Gallery, exhibited at Art Basel in Miami, and completed a two person show at Brooklyn’s McCarren Park. Robin was interviewed in July 2016 by local artist and writer, Wenxin Zhang, for an online Chinese photography magazine, IndieFoto. Previously in 2013 she completed a solo show at Seattle’s 4Culture Gallery and her post bacc at University of Montana. She is currently living and creating in Brooklyn.

robincrookall.com/

PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | US | 2020

CHRISTINE ELFMAN (Ithaca, New York)

Christine Elfman's practice deploys contrasting historical photographic processes (anthotypes and silver gelatin) to interweave categorical genres like still-life and landscape towards constellational groupings that together explore themes of time, death, repetition and ephemerality—perennial conundrums to the medium itself. The jury was struck by Elfman’s thoughtful approach to her subjects, transforming them into elegant pictorial puzzles. She seems well poised to take advantage of the facilities, tools, and the community network provided by the Penumbra residency to further these investigations.

–Arthur Ou (Artist & Educator, Member of the 2020 Jury).

Christine Elfman is a visual artist who makes photographs about and through the process of fading.  She makes pictures out of their own disappearance, to see how the desire for pictorial permanence gives way to change and the invisible.  She received her MFA from California College of the Arts, BFA from Cornell University.  Her work has recently been exhibited at Zona Maco in Mexico City; Philadelphia Photo Arts Center; Handwerker Gallery, Ithaca College; University of the Arts, Philadelphia; Photofairs San Francisco; and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco. Awards and fellowships include a Light Work Grant in Photography, San Francisco Artist Award, Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship, and Constance Saltonstall Foundation Residency. Her work has appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, Photograph Magazine, Der Greif, Humble Arts Foundation, SF Weekly, and The Photo Review. She has taught photography at Cornell University, San Francisco Art Institute, Foothill College, California College of the Arts, and UC Berkeley.  She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine and lives in upstate NY.  She is represented by Euqinom Gallery, San Francisco.

christineelfman.com/

PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | NYC | 2020

Adama Delphine Fawundu

Adama Delphine Fawundu uses photography to explore the spiritual, cultural, and ideological pre-colonial ways of being. Her most recent installation, The Sacred Star of Isis and Other Stories created an environment manifesting conversations between African deities and the diaspora. At the Penumbra Foundation, Fawundu will produce a project I Am Nomoli Am I consisting of large-scale self-portraits for her next solo exhibition. Fawundu’s extensive ongoing research into African Diasporic cultures and in particular beauty, masks, identity and adornment, among other themes, excited the jury and we look forward to seeing what Fawundu produces.

–Odette England (Artist & Educator, Member of the 2020 Jury).

Adama Delphine Fawundu is photographer and visual artist born in Brooklyn, NY to parents from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, West Africa. With over fifteen years experience working as a photographer, Fawundu enhanced her studio practice and completed her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2018. In recognition of her artistic practice, Ms. Fawundu received the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award, was named one of OkayAfrica’s 100 Women making an impact on Africa and its Diaspora and included in the Royal Photographic Society’s (UK) Hundred Heroines, in 2018. Ms. Fawundu’s other awards include, New York Foundation of the Arts Photography Fellow, Brooklyn Art Council Grant, Open Society Foundation Community Fellow, the Brooklyn Historical Society Community Initiative Grant, BRIC Workspace Artist-in-Residence. Ms. Fawundu has exhibited internationally, with solo shows in 2019 at the African American Museum in Philadelphia and Crush Curatorial gallery in Chelsea, NYC. Ms. Fawundu’s works can be found in the private and public collections such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Historical Society, The Norton Museum of Art, Corridor Art Gallery, The David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland and The Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo, Brazil.

delphinefawundu.com/

PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | NYC | 2020

ARASH FEWZEE

Arash Fewzee creates a system using and reusing photographs as tools for residues of performances in the darkroom. Creating photograms that map the movement and generate new shadows to form installations. In this creative way of reconstructing photography, Arash will be adding to his vocabulary with black & white and wet plate photography. We are excited to see where his practice will turn with his dedication to performance, labor and experimentation in this new work.

–Monique Deschaines (Director Euqinom Gallery, Member of the 2020 Jury).

Arash Fewzee was born in 1989 in Mashhad, Iran and currently lives and works in New York. His artistic practice spans photography, installation, video, and sculpture and has been exhibited in New York City and internationally, most recently at The Rubber Factory. He holds a bachelor of science in Economics from Ferdowsi University and an MFA from Parsons, The New School. He has been awarded residencies at Showhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Triangle Arts Association and Baxter St Camera Club of NY.

PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | US | 2020

WHITNEY HUBBS (ALFRED, NEW YORK)

Whitney Hubbs’ dynamic and heady photographs bring together elements of performance, literature, and sculpture, into a practice of photography addressing issues of feminism, drama, and the narrative. Since 2019, Hubbs has made many photographic self-portraits, which she plans to continue working on during her time at the Penumbra Foundation, in readiness for a book to be published in 2021. As a jury, we were enthused by Hubbs’ approach to making variants of her body and selfhood visible through the lens, and by her desire to contextualize these images in relation to nature and current affairs.

–Odette England (Artist & Educator, Member of the 2020 Jury).

Whitney Hubbs was born and raised in Southern California with a brief stint in Portland, Oregon, Whitney Hubbs was involved in the punk rock riot grrrl community from a young age, where she made fanzines, organized art shows, participated in performances and worked as an activist. She later received her BFA from the California College of Arts in 2005 and an MFA at UCLA in 2009. She is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Alfred University. Hubbs is currently represented by M+B Gallery in Los Angeles and Situations Gallery in New York City. She currently lives in New York state.

whitneyhubbs.com/

PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | NYC | 2020

Martyna Szczęsna

Martyna Szczęsna uses photography and sculpture to create photograms that reference mechanical tropes and processes as metaphor. Her conceptual interests span a variety of interconnected ideas. These include urban ecology, human intervention, incongruity, disruption, topography, and fractured identity. Martyna's recent series GOBOS - comprising sculptures made out of slumped glass - speak both to industrialization and uncertainty. At Penumbra Foundation, Martyna will continue to experiment with photograms while investigating solarization techniques, colorization, and scale. We were especially impressed with how Martyna combines in her work the conflicts of utopian constructs with the sublime.

–Monique Deschaines (Director Euqinom Gallery, Member of the 2020 Jury).

Martyna Szczęsna (b. Olsztyn, Poland) is a multi-disciplinary artist working between photography and sculpture to unpack the conflict between image and reality. Her work pursues an urban surrealism whose disruptive somatic effects point toward ideological dissonance reflecting the culture at large. Szczęsna is a graduate of the Cooper Union and completed MFA studies at UCLA. She lives and works in Brooklyn. Recent exhibitions include: Ground Control at Under the Oven Gallery, LES, Portrait of a Landscape at the Museo Sivori, BsAs, Disarming Geometries at Dorsky Gallery, LIC and Bronx Calling: The Third Bronx Biennial. Her work has been supported by residencies at Yucca Valley Material Lab, Franconia Sculpture Park, HDTS Wagonstations and The Watermill Center. 

martynaszcz.com/

Public Program (online): Tuesday, September 29th, 2020. 7PM (EST)

About the participants:

Penumbra Foundation is pleased to announce the names of the six selected artists for the 2019 Workspace Program.

Members of the 2019 Jury:

Alissa Schoendfeld (Director of Yossi Milo Gallery, New York City)
Marina Berio (Artist and Educator, Chair Emeritus of the General Studies Program at International Center of Photography, New York City)
Yamini Nayar (Artist. Represented by Thomas Erben, New York City; Wendi Norris, San Francisco; and Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai).

Scroll down to learn about the selected artists.

PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | US | 2019

Samira Yamin (Los Angeles, CA)

Samira Yamin dismantles photographic imagery to expose their internal mechanisms and personal, cultural and political impact. Her past projects reflect rigorous engagement with how war photography constructs and distorts one side of a conflict and adventurous use of non-photographic media. Approaching the Penumbra residency with a solid idea for a new body of work related to her family history and the aim to work directly in the medium of photography, we look forward to seeing what the collaboration between Samira and the Foundation’s facilities, expertise and lens collection, will likely yield.

–Alissa Schoenfeld (Director of Yossi Milo Gallery. Member of the 2019 Jury).

Samira Yamin (b.1983) received an MFA from UC Irvine and BAs in Art and Sociology from UCLA. She has had solo exhibitions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and PATRON Gallery, and has been included in numerous group exhibitions including at the Craft and Folk Art Museum, the Camera Club of New York, Metropolitan State University in Denver, and San Francisco State University. A recipient of grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the California Community Foundation, Yamin has been an Artist in Residence at the Rauschenberg Residency, Headlands Center for the Arts and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

samirayamin.com | @samirayamin

PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | US | 2019

Rachelle Bussières (San Francisco, CA)

Rachelle Bussières’ work coaxes new colors and luminescence from photographs materials, which we found to be refreshing. Using both sculptural objects and experimentation with light and chemistry in the darkroom, her constructed abstractions are surprising and distinct. Rachelle’s proposal for advancing her work during the residency has been clearly articulated, informed by the rich opportunities that the facilities of Penumbra, New York City and East Coast light will provide. Her skill with the lumen print process will be a welcome contribution to the Penumbra community’s pool of knowledge.

–Alissa Schoenfeld (Director of Yossi Milo Gallery. Member of the 2019 Jury).

Rachelle Bussières (b.1986) received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and is currently a Charter Resident at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco. She is the recipient of the Graduate Fellowship Award from the Headlands Center for the Arts, California; and the Award for Excellence from the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation. Her work has been exhibited at Johansson Projects (Oakland, CA), the Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO), Robert Koch Gallery (San Francisco, CA), Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco, CA), Galerie l’Inlassable (Paris, FR), Headlands Center for the Arts (Sausalito, CA) and Present Company (New York, NY). She was awarded residencies at the Banff Centre in Alberta, the Vermont Studio Center and Sim in Iceland. Her work can be found in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. 

rachellebussieres.com | @rachellebussieres

PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | NYC | 2019

Lucy Helton (Brooklyn)

“Lucy Helton's project is an interplay of the fictitious and futuristic. Her concerns into the environment combines with language technologies-radio and image transmissions for instance - to investigate these issues through a subtle and haunting lens. How to engage an audience that is increasingly desensitized is within her thought process, and more utopian representations have began to emerge in her work. Her most recent images considers the ecosystem and specifically issues of water - pollution, melting and disappearance.  Lucy has an experimental and process-oriented approach and will fully make use of Penumbra's facilities. This residency will give her the time, space and practical tools to further develop her project and vision.”

–Yamini Nayar (Artist. Member of the 2019 Jury).

Born in London and based in New York, Lucy Helton received her master’s degree in fine art photography from Hartford Art School, CT, in 2014. Rising from a necessity to express her personal anxieties and concerns about the environment, her first photobook Actions of Consequence was nominated for the MACK First Book Award 2014, shortlisted for the Kassel Dummy Award 2015, and The Anamorphosis Prize 2015. Her most recent book Transmission (Silas Finch, 2015) is a communication from our future to our recent past and was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture First Book Award 2015. Meditations on the future state of the environment and if human colonies will exist outside planet earth, led to her discovery and fascination with basic image transmission using low energy radio waves. Gaining a HAM radio General Class license, Helton advances these themes in her practice. The resulting artworks test the boundaries of art and technology and continue to question our current path of planetary destruction. Helton’s books are collected by the Cleveland Institute of Art, MoMA, MET, Brooklyn Museum, Houston Center of Photography, Hirsch Library at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the David M. Rubinstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, among others.

lucyhelton.com | @lucyhelton

PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | NYC | 2019

Irene Mamiye (Manhattan)

“Irene Mamiye's large, visually complex and layered works draw from photography, sculpture, video and new media. Her work is completely created from imagery found online - digital archives and across social media - and utilizes software programs as physical tools to explore the "changing relationship between artistic process and output." Digital software tools become her brushes to distort and fragment as do the algorithms themselves within her making of images. During her residency, Irene will expand her practice through delving into the alternative processes and workshops offered at Penumbra. as a way to "look back" and situate her practice within a historical context of photography and materials.”

–Yamini Nayar (Artist. Member of the 2019 Jury).

Irene Mamiye (b. Marseille, France) has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally. Selected group exhibitions include: Ebb and Flow at Cheryl Hazan Contemporary Art, New York (2013); The Edge of Vision: Abstraction in Contemporary Photography at the Aperture Foundation, New York (2013); Multiple Exposures: Jewelry and Photography at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2014); Photography is Magic curated by Charlotte Cotton at the Aperture Foundation, New York (2016); Text Messages at Lanoue Gallery, Boston (2018); # curated by Markus Linnenbrink at Cindy Rucker Gallery, New York (2018). Her most recent solo exhibition, Irene Mamiye: Homage was held at Lanoue Gallery, Boston in 2018. Irene received her MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media in 2014 from the School of Visual Arts and was a MORPHOS Artist in Residence (2018) and a Transart Academy fellow (2019).

PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | INTERNATIONAL | 2019

ALMUDENA ROMERO (LONDON, ENGLAND)

Almudena Romero uses historical imagery of all kinds – portraits of abolitionists, a diagram of a slave ship, Jamaican currency bearing the a bust of Queen Elizabeth, shots of contemporary sports personalities - to weave together a multifaceted, wide-ranging exploration of global migration and colonialism. She prints on actual plant specimens to poetically reference questions of nativity, trade and exchange. What is nature and what is culture, what does it mean to be “of” a place? The centuries-old traumas and hardships, imprinted on the psyches and skins of many peoples, that Romero alludes to in her use of archival materials are just as relevant today.

–Marina Berio (Artist and Educator. Member of the 2019 Jury)

Almudena Romero is a London based visual artist working with a wide range of photographic processes. Since 2015, Almudena has demonstrated and explained her practice at the Victoria and Albert Museum,National Portrait Gallery,  TATE Modern-TATE Exchange, TATE Britain, The Photographers’ Gallery,Tsinghua Art Museum, the Whitechapel Gallery, Le Cent-Quatre Paris, University of the Arts London, Unseen Amsterdam, The Science Museum UK,  and delivered courses and lectures for Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum, Estorick Collection, Mapfre Foundation, Sotheby's  Institute of Art, University of Westminster, University for the Creative Arts, Kingston University, Southampton Solent University and London Art Fair. She has also received commissions to produce installations in public spaces from Team London Bridge, Southwark Council, Emergency Exit Artist, Wellcome Trust and University College London, Bow Arts Trust & London Festival of Architecture. Her work has been published in Photomonitor, Radio France Internationale, TimeOut, DUST magazine, EXTRA magazine (FOMU, Foto Museum) and other media.

almudenaromero.co.uk | @almudena.romero

PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | INTERNATIONAL | 2019

PEDRO WAINER (Bs.As., ARGENTINA)

Pedro Wainer’s recent work has advanced on two parallel tracks: as part of an art collective called “Provisorio Permanente” he has made ambitious participatory installation work such as turning an old Citröen into a camera obscura which can be entered and used as a private viewing chamber, while he has also pursued his own practice making photographs that bounce back and forth from VHS to CRT screen to photographic collage to early book engravings to X-rays. He has made large unique black and white prints of the hidden bowel-like workings of old movie and film apparatuses of various kinds, ages and shapes, and re-photographed details of Catherine Deneuve’s languorous figure in Buñuel’s classic, Belle de Jour, closing in on the disintegrating texture of red, blue and green dots that compose the apparently black and white images. In Wainer’s work, paradoxically, the impending threat of the death of analog spawns new forms, methods and procedures.

–Marina Berio (Artist and Educator. Member of the 2019 Jury)

Pedro Wainer grew up in Buenos Aires where he studied film, photography, and dramaturgy. In 2003 Wainer began to collaborate with a group of three artists, forming the art collective ‘Provisorio Permanente’, with whom he creates participatory performances and installations that focus on generating intimate, direct experiences that are activated by the viewer’s presence, combining diverse media and exploring concepts of physical limits and boundaries within each art work. Alongside this ongoing collaborative group, Wainer’s individual practice is centered more specifically within cinema and photography, from an object-oriented perspective. These lens based mediums tend to be immaterial, focusing primarily on the image, yet Wainer puts at forefront the materiality of the apparatuses used to make his work. His approach to photography comes out of experimentation with traditional techniques and salvaging and reconfiguring technologies in disuse. Wainer is interested in analog film processes not only as a physical/chemical phenomenon, but also as an exploration of the history of the mechanisms that make these techniques possible. He uses analog machines and instruments and transforms them into new devices to generate images that no longer follow the machine’s designated purpose. Through this process, Wainer creates a photographic archeology of these machines, where his role is both to salvage and pervert their original function.

PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | 2018 SELECTED ARTISTS

The two residents will receive a one-time honorarium and a stipend for food and travel. The artists will have liberal access to the labs, digital tools, alternative processes darkroom, equipment and shooting studios, as well as donated photographic supplies from Fuji Film, special discounts at LTI Professional Lab Services, free admission to public programs and the possibility to be published in a special catalog.

Penumbra Foundation would like to thank all the applicants for their efforts and participation. We received a surprising number of applications from a very diverse and inspiring group of artists. We are delighted to see the interest that this new program has generated among the community across the country.

To learn more about the program please click here.

*  Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa is a photographer, writer, and former editor of the contemporary photography website The Great Leap Sideways (2011—2017). He has contributed essays to catalogues and monographs by Vanessa Winship, George Georgiou, Marton Perlaki and Paul Graham, He has been an artist-in-residence at Light Work, guest edited the Aperture Photobook Review, and written for Aperture, FOAM magazine and The Photographer’s Gallery. He has lectured at Yale, Cornell and The New School, and is a faculty member in the photography department at Purchase College, SUNY.

PENUMBRA WORKSPACE PROGRAM | 2017 SELECTED ARTISTS