Features

Michelle Peterson  Selected artist from…

Maria Jose Navas Espinal Selected…

This exhibition presents images from 44 young photographers who graduated in the Spring of 2020, amid the disruptions and closures brought on by the spread of COVID-19.  We set out to create a call for entries that could provide an alternative to canceled and disrupted thesis exhibitions to give students an opportunity to present their work to a broader public. The following represents a survey of submitted works, including one image from each newly graduated photographer who submitted to our call.

Cloaked in a rhetoric of commercial promise, Joseph Desler Costa’s pictures appear, with glossy sheen, fresh off an assembly line. At first glance they present a seemingly impenetrable surface of salesmanship, a mere costuming over the artist’s searching through his own memory for products of promise that have shaped his upbringing. Costa finds an inseparable link between aesthetics and desire, allowing his own pictures to succumb to that aesthetics as a means to reveal the inner workings of them. In his pictures, consumer staples like Nike shoes and McDonald’s fries are mixed with sparse fragments of recreated memories rendered with foggy vagueness. What Costa produces is a masquerade of a masquerade, subverting the idealist promise of commerce and blending memory and desire into hypnotic echo of an echo of the real. What things may satisfy us? What convinces us of their satisfying qualities? How do pictures sell things, or inversely, how can a picture help but not be an advertisement for itself? And what of our own desire really belongs to us, and what has been implanted via the stealthy pointy end of a well made picture?

Joe Rudko’s work is anything but predictable, yet he calls upon familiar visual spaces in ways that offer a sense of stability. His capacity to find practical and emotional value in the process of art-making keeps him invested in finding novel ways to articulate his ideas.

  gregory eddi jones One…

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These are landscape photographs of landscapes that do not exist. I generated the images using a GAN (Generative Adversarial Network). A GAN is a form of artificial intelligence, a deep neural network computer program consisting of two nets, a generator, and a discriminator, which have an adversarial relationship. A GAN can be taught to mimic any distribution of data. In this case, landscape photographs were fed to the program and I then played with the parameters and “bred” new images over and over again until I obtained the image you see.

  Mexico, Masks | Rituals…

Paho Mann investigates the personal and cultural relationships to objects we collect to address shifting values, perceptions, and memory. In the project, Fragmented Cameras, Mann used a consumer-grade 3D scanner to scan historic and obsolete cameras ranging from early stereoscopic cameras to first-generation iPhones…

The artists in this exhibition reflect on notions of paradise, idealism, and fantasy through a broad spectrum of photographic strategies. Together, the works here represent competing visual rhetoric spanning commercialism, irony, sincerity, observational and interpretative documentary, camp, appropriation, tableaux, personal narrative, and impartial photographic philosophies….

snap+share: transmitting photographs from mail art to social networks makes a case that the dissemination of photographs is just as important as their creation. It’s an exhibition about the socialization of photographs, various forms of sharing throughout the medium’s history, and the conceptual issues that arise from the immediacy of online sharing.