FAU Presents the Photo-based Art Exhibition

DOROTHY F. SCHMIDT COLLEGE OF ARTS
AND LETTERS
School of the Arts
University Galleries
777 Glades Road
Boca Raton, FL 33431
tel: 561.297.2966
fax: 561.297.2166
www.fau.edu/galleries
MEDIA CONTACT: Polly Burks
561-297-2595, [email protected]
HIGH RES IMAGE CONTACT: Mariela Acuna
561-297-2661, [email protected]
FAU Presents the Photo-based Art Exhibition ‘Altarations: Built,
Blended, Processed’
BOCA RATON, FLA. (October 1, 2014) – The University Galleries in Florida Atlantic University’s Dorothy F.
Schmidt College of Arts and Letters will present “Altarations: Built, Blended, Processed,” an exhibition of photo-based art,
in both of its galleries in late 2014 and early 2015. The first half of the exhibition will open in the Schmidt Center Gallery on
Thursday, Nov. 20, and the second half will open in the Ritter Art Gallery on Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2015. Both galleries are
located at 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton campus.
“Altarations: Built, Blended, Processed” presents works by more than 20 contemporary artists. Most of the artists
live and work throughout the United States while a few reside in other countries including Israel, Denmark and Peru. While
hardly unified in style and content, the artists’ works in “Altarations” blend photographic images and processes to produce
works that celebrate, contradict and undermine photographic traditions through altered images and references. The title of the
exhibition is derived from Mark C. Taylor’s “Altarity,” a 1987 book of philosopher Taylor’s writing that brings together his
interpretation and synthesis of several modern philosophers’ interpretations of difference and otherness.
The artists included in the exhibition employ practices that simultaneously subvert photographic traditions while
also employing the medium’s salient characteristics that revolve around the physics of light and light sensitive chemistries,
some of which use this property to relate and respond to digital image making technologies. While some are dubious and
work against computer-mediated imaging and printing techniques, many of the artists in “Altarations” employ and fully
embrace digital image-making processes. In addition, several of the photographers are also painters and their work in the
exhibition employs processes akin to photography such as scanning, the much older process of hand-made collage, and in one
case, painting abstractly over old family snapshots. Stylistically, the artists use or reference to formal or geometric abstraction
unifies their work in this exhibition.
While the exhibition’s title refers to altering photographic images, a ubiquitous practice in our image-saturated
culture, the photo-based art in the exhibition has a much more narrow focus than the work of artists who manipulate
photographs. The exhibition focuses on artists whose photo-based works are strategically built through combining, blending
and processing images that strongly veer toward formal abstraction while also systematically doubling down on visual and
social aspects of contemporary image-making technologies and phenomena. The works in “Altarations” reflect on
contemporary image making, consumption and proliferation as well as how the latter seemingly permeates every corner of
contemporary life.
The exhibition was selected by co-curators W. Rod Faulds, director of FAU’s University Galleries, and Jeanie
Giebel, FAU Bachelor of Fine Arts graduate (2013), who is currently a curatorial assistant at the Margulies Collection in
Miami. Both will contribute essays to a catalogue to be published to document the exhibition. The “Altarations” catalogue
will also include an essay by Heather Diack, assistant professor of art history from the University of Miami, who is an expert
in conceptual art and the history of photography.
The curators admit that “Altarations” is influenced by recent exhibitions in New York that have resonance
internationally in contemporary art and photographic circles. These exhibitions include “What is A Photograph?” and “A
World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio” at the International Center of Photography (ICP) and the Museum of
Modern Art (MoMA) respectively. While narrower in scope than both of these exhibitions “Altarations” is like no other
photography exhibition presented at South Florida museums or university galleries in recent memory.
The first part of the exhibition will open in the Schmidt Center Gallery on Thursday, Nov. 20 with a 7 p.m. lecture
by participating Miami artist Maria Martinez-Cañas. Cañas is one of five artists in the exhibition that co-curator Faulds
considers to be historical rudders for the rest of the exhibition. The other artists, James Welling, Ellen Carey, Barbara Kasten
and Penelope Umbrico, have created precedent setting work for more than 20 years. Whether or not their works influenced or
are even known by the mostly younger artists in the exhibition, their works provide a strong example of the themes and
sensibilities running throughout the exhibition’s diverse abstract works.
The second part of the exhibition will open in the Ritter Art Gallery on Thursday, Jan. 14, 2015 with a public
opening event to be followed by additional public programs featuring several exhibiting artists. These programs will be
announced by December.
The University Galleries at FAU are free and open to the public Tuesdays through Fridays, from 1 to 4 p.m., and
Saturdays from 1 to 5 p.m. Group and class tours are welcome during public hours as well as at other times scheduled by
appointment. Gallery exhibitions are sponsored by the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County. For more information, call
561-297-2661, email [email protected] or visit www.fau.edu/galleries.
- FAUAbout Florida Atlantic University:
Florida Atlantic University, established in 1961, officially opened its doors in 1964 as the fifth public university in Florida. Today, the
University, with an annual economic impact of $6.3 billion, serves more than 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students at sites
throughout its six-county service region in southeast Florida. FAU’s world-class teaching and research faculty serves students through 10
colleges: the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, the College of Business, the College for Design and Social Inquiry, the
College of Education, the College of Engineering and Computer Science, the Graduate College, the Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College, the
Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine, the Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing and the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science. FAU is
ranked as a High Research Activity institution by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The University is placing
special focus on the rapid development of three signature themes – marine and coastal issues, biotechnology and contemporary societal
challenges – which provide opportunities for faculty and students to build upon FAU’s existing strengths in research and scholarship.
For more information, visit www.fau.edu.
Altarations: Built, Blended, Processed
November 2014 – March 2015
University Galleries
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
Altarations: Built, Blended, Processed is an exhibition featuring contemporary artists that blend photographic
images and processes to produce works that celebrate, contradict and undermine photographic traditions
through altered images and references. The title of the exhibition, Altarations, is derived from Mark C. Taylor’s
Altarity – an anthology of Taylor’s writing that brings together his interpretation and synthesis of modern
philosophies in analytical discussions of difference and otherness. The exhibition recalls the alternative
photography movement of the 1970s and the earlier examples of advanced visual artists who employed
photographic imagery such as Robert Rauschenberg, John Baldessari and Martha Rosler among many others
who have used photography to consciously step outside the confines of naturalistic or illusionistic representation.
The artists included in Altarations continue practices that simultaneously subvert photographic traditions
while also employing the medium’s salient characteristics that revolve around the physics of light and
lightsensitive chemistries. These artists of course also relate and respond to digital image-making
technologies. While some are dubious and work against computer-mediated imaging and printing
techniques, many of the artists in Altarations employ and fully embrace digital image-making processes.
Altarations: Built, Blended, Processed has a much narrower focus than artists who manipulate photographic
images. The exhibition focuses upon artists whose photo-based works are strategically built through
combining, blending and processing images that strongly veer towards formal abstraction while also
systematically doubling down on visual and social aspects of contemporary image making technologies
and phenomena. The works in Altarations reflect on contemporary image making, consumption and
proliferation as well as how the latter seemingly permeates every corner of contemporary life.
The Altarations exhibition further prioritizes the static photo-based image, forcing a closer comparison to
painting and other traditional art image-making practices. While more than a few of the artists employ and
investigate the moving image through film and video in some of their works, Altarations focuses on static
images to examine how contemporary photo-based art mimics, questions and parallels practices in current
art, particularly abstract painting, while also equally mining and reflecting photography’s art history(s).
A notable aspect of today’s manipulated image-making featured in Altarations is that the works often share
a “look” not unlike the alternative photography of the 1970s. The philosophies of that earlier, primarily
photographic movement, promoted a new vision for the role of the photographic image, a philosophy railing
against both a popular snapshot generation and the then prominent photographic art that was narrowly bent
on truth, beauty and tonal values, mostly in what we today call gray scale. That alternative philosophy seems
not far off the sentiments of artists in Altarations and many others who question and confound digital image
proliferation while simultaneously longing for the seeming purity of analogue photography’s relationship to
light and chemical processes.
Altarations also features works that demonstrate and perhaps help us understand what might be an intrinsic
desire to transform reality-based images. The artists in the exhibition insert their hand into the picture plane
of the photographic image by digitally or physically altering the image through additive and subtractive
approaches to build and process their own spaces. The exhibition aims to challenge viewer’s understandings
of photographic language by presenting a select group of exemplary contemporary artists whose core
practice involves photography and acknowledges the post digital age currently affecting the photographic
medium if not most every aspect our lives.
Finally, Altarations admits and plays off the curators’ awareness of recent exhibitions in New York and
America that have resonance in contemporary art and photographic circles. Specifically, the complimentary
exhibitions What is A Photograph? and A World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio at the
International Center of Photography (ICP) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), respectively, presented
historical precedents and contemporary practitioners whose works often exhibit alternative methods and
philosophies shared with artists in Altarations. The proposed exhibition also has relatives in exhibitions like
Altarations: Built, Blended, Processed
November 2014 – March 2015
University Galleries
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Garden’s Second Nature: Abstract Photography Then and Now
(2012/13) and Altered Appropriations: Making Strange (2010) at Chapman University’s Guggenheim Gallery
(Orange County, CA). An exhibition like these and Altarations has not appeared in a South Florida/Miami
region museum or university gallery.
Other exhibitions at the previously mentioned New York institutions, namely the annual New Photography at
MoMA and the ICPs Triennial series, have influenced our inclusions as much as our exclusions, particularly
when we felt an artist’s work had reached a point of overexposure. Altarations will include only a few of
these more recognized artists whose work has been seen in the aforementioned exhibitions/venues along
with a few earlier practitioners of the exhibition’s described tendencies who are still actively producing
compelling work. Perhaps most importantly, Altarations also presents lesser-known artists, some may seem
tangential to these by now codified alternative practices, as a way to indicate yet other alternatives. Such a
blend of artists seems a very reasonable, if not the best way to educate, engage and hopefully even agitate
our audience of art students and the wider art-interested public of our five-county South Florida region about
a narrow but important slice of today’s ever present photo-based art.
Altarations is co-curated by University Galleries’ director W. Rod Faulds, a curator, exhibition designer and
educator along with recent FAU graduate, Jeanie Giebel, who is currently a curatorial intern at the Marguiles
Collection, Miami. The project includes a catalogue with texts by the co-curators and Heather Diack,
associate professor of Art History, University of Miami. The catalogue will be produced after the exhibition
opens to include installation views of the exhibition and documentation of visiting artists and associated
public programs. The exhibition will be presented in the University Galleries’ three exhibition spaces.
– Schmidt Center Gallery & Public Space: November 20, 2014 through February 28, 2015
– Ritter Art Gallery: January 15 through February 28, 2015
About The University Galleries, FAU
www.fau.edu/galleries
Over the last decade and more, the University Galleries at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) have produced
numerous thematically based exhibitions largely borrowed from artists and galleries in New York City and
collections in Miami/South Florida. Many of these exhibitions have been produced in association with guest
curators. Beginning in 2000, some of those exhibitions include:
POUR – www.fau.edu/galleries/pour.php
Delicatessen – www.fau.edu/galleries/deli_exhibition.php
Me, Myself & I – www.fau.edu/galleries/memyself.php
Natural Histories – www.fau.edu/galleries/catsbynaturalhistory.php
NeverNeverLand – www.fau.edu/galleries/neverneverland.php
In addition the University Galleries have consistently presented innovative contemporary art produced in
southeast Florida and the southeastern region of the U.S. through frequent presentation of the
South Florida Cultural Consortium Visual and Media Artists Fellowship Exhibition (2001, 2006, 2009 & 2012)
www.fau.edu/galleries/SoFLoCo09.php ; and, the University Galleries’ every three years exhibition
southXeast: Contemporary Southeastern Art (2005, 2008, 2011, 2014)
www.fau.edu/galleries/2011southXeast.php
About Rod Faulds
www.wrodfaulds.com
Schmidt Center Gallery
Altarations: Built, Blended, Processed
Selected Artwork Image Sheet
Ilit Azoulay
Born 1972, Israel
Lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel
Room #8, Wall no. 3, 2011
archival pigment print, 59 x 98 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Andrea Meislin Gallery, New York
High-resolution image available upon request
Ellen Carey
Born 1952, Buffalo, NY
Lives and works in Hartford, CT
Dings and Shadows: Multicolor, 2014
color photograms-unique, 96 x 30 inches
Collection of the artist and courtesy of
Jayne H. Baum Gallery, New York, NY
High-resolution image available upon request
Lisa Gwilliam & Ray Sweeten (DataSpaceTime)
Ray Sweeten:
Born 1975
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
Lisa Gwilliam:
Born 1973
Lives and works in Brookly, NY
Finite Field A, 2014
C-print on aluminum, 43 x 38.5 inches
Courtesy the artists and Microscope Gallery, New York
High-resolution image available upon request
Barbara Kasten
Born 1936, Chicago, IL
Lives and works in Chicago, IL
Scene IX, 2012
archival pigment print, 54.5 x 43.5 inches
Courtesy of the artist and the Bortolami Gallery, New York
High-resolution image available upon request
University Galleries
School of the Arts
Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters
561.297.2661 • www.fau.edu/galleries
November 21, 2014 – February 28, 2015
Schmidt Center Gallery
Altarations: Built, Blended, Processed
Selected Artwork Image Sheet
Maria Martinez-Cañas
Born 1960, Havana, Cuba
Lives and Works in Miami, FL
Bunker Series, Untitled001, 2013
archival pigment prints, collage + watercolor
on arches aquarelle 310gms paper, 34 x 44 inches
Courtesy of the artist Julie Saul Gallery, New York
High-resolution image available upon request
Matthew Porter
Born 1975, State College, PA
LIves and works in Brooklyn, NY
This is Tomorrow, 2013
archival pigment print, 57 x 46.5 inches
Courtesy of the artist, Invisible Exports, New York
High-resolution image available upon request
Hugh Scott-Douglas
Born 1988, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
Untitled, 2014
UV curable ink on wood panel , 80 x 53 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco
Eileen Quinlan
Born 1972, Boston, MA
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
Hildegaard, 2012
chromogenic print, 40 x 30 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York
High-resolution image available upon request
University Galleries
School of the Arts
Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters
561.297.2661 • www.fau.edu/galleries
November 21, 2014 – February 28, 2015
Schmidt Center Gallery
Altarations: Built, Blended, Processed
Selected Artwork Image Sheet
James Welling
Born 1951, Hartford, Connecticut
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA
Torso 1-18, 2005-2008
C-print , 52.6 x 40.5 inches
Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London
Penelope Umbrico
Born 1957, Philadelphia, PA
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
22,653,725 Suns from Sunsets from Flickr
(Partial) 9/17/2014 (detail), 2014
4 x 6 inch machine C-prints
Courtesy of the artist; LMAK Projects, New York;
and Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles
High-resolution image available upon request
University Galleries
School of the Arts
Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters
561.297.2661 • www.fau.edu/galleries
November 21, 2014 – February 28, 2015
Ritter Art Gallery
Altarations: Built, Blended, Processed
Selected Artwork Image Sheet
Erica Baum
Born 1961, New York, NY
Lives and works in New York, NY
Session Wavy Miami Street, 2013
two framed archival pigment prints,
three engineering bond posters, 49 x 64 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Bureau, New York
High-resolution image available upon request
Jibade-Khalil Huffman
Born 1981, Detroit, MI
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA
LLL3, 2013
archival inkjet print, 24 x 36 inches
Courtesy of the artist
Yamini Nayar
Born 1975, Rochester, NY
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY
One of These Days, 2009
C-print, 36 x 48 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Erben Gallery, New York
Asbjørn Skou
Born 1984, Copenhagen, Denmark
Lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark
Untitled (A Hole Through the Future) 11, 2013
laser print, Xerox copy on cardstock, 27 x 19 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Munch Gallery, New York
High-resolution image available upon request
University Galleries
School of the Arts
Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters
561.297.2661 • www.fau.edu/galleries
January 15 – February 28, 2015
Ritter Art Gallery
Altarations: Built, Blended, Processed
Selected Artwork Image Sheet
Ishmael Randall Weeks
Born 1976, Cusco, Peru
Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and Lima, Peru
Techo (Nuevo Mundo S.), 2012
acrylic and photo transfer drawing
with cut-out mounted on paper, 8.0625 x 6 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Eleven Rivington, New York
High-resolution image available upon request
John Mann
Born 1972, Charlottesville, VA
Lives and works in Tallahassee, FL
Untitled, 2013
pigment print, 50 x 40 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York
High resolution image available upon request
Hannah Whittaker
Born 1980, Washington D.C., MD
Lives and works in New York. NY
Ship of Theseus, 2014
archival pigment prints
Courtesy of the artist and M+B Gallery, Los Angeles
Jennifer Williams
Born 1972, South West, PA
Lives and works in New York, NY
[Flo#7] BoweryHouston - Avalon Chrystie to Bowery Hotel, 2011
archival pigment print, 17 x 22 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Robert Mann Gallery, New York
High-resolution image available upon request
University Galleries
School of the Arts
Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters
561.297.2661 • www.fau.edu/galleries
January 15 – February 28, 2015

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