Penelope Umbrico
website
representation
Penelope Umbrico is an artist living and working in New York City. She attended undergrad at Ontario College of art and received her MFA at NY School of Visual Arts. She currently teaches graduate and undergraduate photography programs at School of Visual Arts, Parsons School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design and Bard College. Aside from teaching she does various visiting lectures and is widely shown. She is represented in the collections of MOMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I wasn't really sure what to expect when I came to this lecture. A friend told me that I really needed to go to it but I assumed because it was photography. But I realised later that Umbrico's work was highly appropriated and that it would be good insight to a direction I think I'm going in.
Her body of work is really extensive. I can only imagine how many harddrives she owns. She said that she works on several projects at once and that they are constantly growing over the years. I think her most popular work is probably the Suns From Flickr. She searched Flickr to find out what the most popular type of picture was, resulting in sunsets. Umbrico collects thousands of images and documents the count from the site and uses it in the title. Most interesting to me is the idea of "fair use". Some viewers argued whether or not she should be able to use their pictures and questioned Umbrico for what she was doing in a Flickr discussion board. Umbrico argued that once you upload an image into such a public domain, you lose ownership somewhat. She compared it to leaving a belonging out on the ground. Someone can walk by and pick it up and take it into their ownership. She wasn't assuming ownership of the images though. She is appropriating to make a statement, educate in a sense, so that is fair use. She wasnt taking pictures of other pictures and claiming that it was her original work.
I wasn't too sure how I felt about appropriation before seeing this lecture. Is it right? Is there a right and wrong when it comes to art? She opened my eyes to the different types of appropriation and various reasons. You have to make it your own. I don't necessarily agree with artists that directly copy work and claim it as their own (Sherrie Levine) but I understand why they do it.
Some of Umbrico's work was just incredibly pleasing to the eye. Aesthetically, I liked the Doors and Mirrors pieces the most. She flips through home improvement catalogs and rips out different things that she likes. With the doors she was interested in what was depicted outside of the doors and cut just those sections out. She was interested in what replaced the viewer in mirrors and cut those mirrors out too. She scanned the mirror scraps at an incredibly high resolution, reprinted it, and mounted it to come out from the wall. They almost function as real mirrors, void of the experience of the viewer. The inspiration was her mirror breaking at home and feeling displaced not seeing herself.
I was pleased with the lecture overall. Its definitely motivated me and made me feel better about the idea of appropriation.
Out of Place/Mirrors and Door Openings From Catalogs, 2002,
Installation at Julie Saul Gallery, NY
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