2016 Year in Review

The Spain Project - October 2016

We were recently approached by Patricio Binaghi who requested we participate with a collection with an assortment of artists and writers  in his project, "Autores, Interpretes y Compositores," published by Paripé Books. Using a photographic archive about American Life in the 50's & 60’s, we will be providing a photo interpreting a photograph from this archive.

The book will be presented with an exhibition in Buenos Aires, Germany and Madrid as a part Photo España in July 2017.

BeyoReal, 1978 with Archive Inspiration

Glory on a Budget, # Turkey 1979 with Archive Inspiration

 

 

 

 

 

 

Exhibition - Forged Worlds

September 2016-17

Curated by Sam Barzillay
 Adams Street, Plymouth Street, and Anchorage Place /Manhattan Bridge Anchorage, 
DUMBO Brooklyn, New York
September Through July 24, 2017
 Processed Views is part of a large-scale outdoor group exhibition presented by:
United Photo Industries (UPI), in partnership with the 
DUMBO Business Improvement District and the New ork City Department of Transportation.

Honored  to be showing with other landscape constructivists
Lori Nix (New York, NY) — The City
Bill Finger (Seattle, WA) — Ground Control
Julia Fullerton-Batten (London, UK) — Teenage Stories
Nadine Boughton (Gloucester, MA) — True Adventures in Better Homes
Justin Bettman (New York, NY) — Set in the Street
Jie Ling He (New York, NY) — Microland

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Exhibition - I Witness: Activist Art and Social Movement Politics

Curated by Krista Wojrtendyke and Margaret Le Jeune

Heuser Art Center and Hartmann Center Gallery, 

Bradley University,  Peoria, Illinois

August 8 – September 23.

Selections from Watch Me Grow included in this exhibition of artists whose work addresses issues of social justice and political engagement to create a platform for discussion through the visual arts.

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Lecture - ¡Broadcast! on Riverwest Radio!   

 June 28, 2016

Riverwest Radio
Tuesday
6.28.16
6:30pm CST

"We have Barbara Ciurej& Lindsay Lochman - feminist photographers who have been plowing fertile territory in their projects, regardless of the obstacles that stand in their way. Listen in!"

Listen HERE!
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Exhibition - Rick Wester Fine Art  

June 2 –July 29, 2016 

Lost in Space: Contemporary Photographers and the New Landscape

Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman, Christopher Colville, Molly Lamb, David Magnusson, Diana Matar, Lilly McElroy, Aaron Rothman

June 2 –July 29, 2016
Rick Wester Fine Art
526 W 26th St #417
New York, NY

This summer RWFA is presenting a group exhibition featuring the work of eight photographers abstractly exploring the classic subject of landscape. Photographing the landscape is as old as the medium itself. As a universal subject it reflects the aesthetics, approaches and attitudes of each era throughout history. For the majority of its first century of existence, photographic landscape relied on the Romantic tradition of the 19th century. In the 1960s and 70s this began to shift as Western culture, wrestling with profound cultural changes in the Post-War period, such as Pop Art, mass media, consumerism and the Cold War, altered how artists depicted the world at large. In photography, many point to a single exhibition in 1975 for its growing influence. New Topographics, Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape held at the (then) International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, NY included work by photographers who shared a similar disassociated, sly, sardonic and decidedly anti-Romantic aesthetic including Robert Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal and Stephen Shore. Switching out the grand Western vistas of Watkins, O’Sullivan and Adams for urban sprawl and endless concrete, photographers began to radically redefine landscape just as Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour did for architecture in Learning from Las Vegas in 1972.

Today’s generation of photographers, while cognizant of this pedigree, hold their work to no such didactic method. Lost In Space is a group exhibition reflecting some of the current trends in landscape photography, ranging from the lyrical to the dissonant, from the personal to the disassociated. Interestingly, none follow the tradition of using the photographic document as a self-referential means to its own end. Instead, photography is employed to convey a personal point of view, to support the photographer’s overt social condition or place of self in the world. Process plays an important role in many of the photographers’ efforts, including the invented image and the constructed tableau. Landscape, as a concept is more implied and subverted than clearly stated. If Nicholas Nixon’s statement in the original New Topograghics catalogue “The world is infinitely more interesting than any opinions I might have of it”, defines his generation’s position then one might take Aaron Rothman’s artist statement as its correlative: Straight photographs can’t quite convey the increasingly porous border between the natural and the artificial, between the real and the virtual.

 

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Research Excursion - Museum of Food and Drink

May 2016, Brooklyn, New York

"The first exhibit, titled 'Flavor: Making It and Faking It,' is an expansive look at the modern age of the flavor industry, which began in the late 19th century when German chemists discovered vanillin, the primary chemical compound of the vanilla bean. When the MOFAD team first began to workshop ideas, which also included an opening exhibit on food on the battlefield or a look at food from farm to toilet (says Kim, "That didn't seem like the best first course"), the concept of flavor was much more broadly defined.
Flavor was the starting point, but once MOFAD began to consider the physiology, the cultural nuances, and subjectivity of flavor, Arnold and co. realized the museum's scope had to be both narrow and broad. "There is no way to imagine the modern food system without flavoring," he says.
The entire exhibit is contained in one room, which helps the museum's flow. MOFAD claims a few current museums as inspirations (Arnold and Kim both named the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens), and it follows the current trend overtaking museums, a tactile and immersive experience that encourages guests to interact with each of the dozen stations" (Giles).

MOFAD Lab

"MOFAD's most striking exhibit, and what makes the $10 single-admission tickets worth the cost, are the Smell Synthesizers, which were designed (with an assist from the olfactory laboratories of the Monell Chemical Senses Center) and created by Arnold. "He was working around the clock for months," says Kim.

There are several smaller synths, which allow a visitor to explore individual smell experiences: whether a concord grape smell is natural or artificial, for instance, and how a combination of furfuryl mercaptan (known as the 'skunk note') and coffee concentrate yields a Taster's Choice moment of freshly brewed java" (Giles)

smell-o-rama detector

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Exhibition - Processed Views Book

May 28- June 12, 2016

Our book Processed Views is part of Landscape #3 on display at: 
Lower Hewood Farm
Hewood, Chard
Dorset TA20 4NRR
Other book artists: Minna Kantonen, Dafrna Talmor, Emma Weiselander, and special guest artist: James Ravilious.

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April 15 - June 11, 2016   Exhibition - Variant

Lindsay Lochman and Barbara Ciurej

Nicole Naudi

Curated by Paul Druecke in collaboration with Sarah Sutterfield

Greymatter Gallery
207 E. Buffalo Street,   Suite 222, Milwaukee.

The exhibition was featured in the Wisconsin Gazette:

"Variant at Greymatter Gallery presents work that deals with social issues and sad ironies. Nine photographs by artistic collaborators Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman are on view. The images are from their Watch Me Grow series, showing exterior views of various day care centers in Milwaukee. The cheery nature of the fragmentary business names and peeling, fading bright paint colors are a mark of struggling hope in the midst of visible decay.

Ciurej and Lochman have been involved in this project since 2009 as a way of documenting and drawing attention to economic disparity. The works point out how aspiration and necessity quickly oppose each other as contradictory positions in poorer neighborhoods.. They cite research on their blog (notebook-watchmegrow.blogspot.com) that notes the exorbitant costs of childcare, and how it has a greater impact on low-income households as it demands a proportionally higher percentage of income. The images in the series and titles of locations suggest values of love and education, but the stark demands of reality are apparent as the window of “Kids R” announces it is enrolling children as young as six weeks old.

While the photographers’ work is the main visual component in the exhibition, there are a number of choices and voices that played a role in the development of Variant. Curator Paul Druecke describes his interest in the relationships that are built by the pattern and arrangement of content. The organizing of Ciurej and Lochman’s photographs in a grid pattern binds them together as singular images that contribute to a larger meaning and purpose. Druecke also ponders notions of transparency, combined with the ubiquitous pattern of the grid, and offers these concepts to Sarah Sutterfield, who selected work by Nicole Naudi to further contribute to the exhibition.

Naudi’s poetry and writing appears as brief passages, accompanied by a few sketches, on transparency sheets which are placed on shelves lined by a grid pattern. Visitors are encouraged to rearrange the transparencies and alter the layers, and consequently the meaning, of the varied parts.

The concept of the grid as a structure, whether as a pattern or a plan of city blocks, has a sense of rigidity, whereas transparency is like a fluid way of seeing. What is visible to our eyes depends on where we turn our attention, and from what vantage point we look. Ciurej and Lochman suggest that seeing and considering the city anew can render the layers of social values, mores, and structures a little more transparent." (Kat Minerath)

Installation of Variant

Installation view of poetry on transparencies by Nicole Naudi.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel also wrote about the show saying: 

"The modest but resoundingly insightful show called “Variant” manages to address some of the most existential quandaries facing the art world today, all inside the 140-square-foot Greymatter gallery.
The Western world has long reckoned with a social question, which is: What is society’s responsibility to those who fall through the cracks?

Similarly, since being emancipated from traditional practices and media over the past half century, the art world faces its own social question, which is: If art is not simply a formal or aesthetic enterprise (meaning: art isn’t simply pretty paintings and sculpture in the round) what is its obligation to use its seemingly limitless agency to address social problems?

At first glance, “Variant” appears routine enough: a grid of nine photographs of storefront architecture by Barbara Ciurej and Lindsey Lochman, and three shelves displaying sketches and text by Nicole Naudi.
Ciurej’s and Lochman’s photographs turn out to be of daycare centers in economically distressed areas of Milwaukee, so they’re packed with social significance. But the social material is girded with exceeding formal rigor. Beyond the precise, gridded arrangement on the wall, the photographs themselves have the internal composure of a Piet Mondrian, with door jambs, window casings, and vertical blinds reacting to an implied grid that seems imposed by art history as much as carpentry. In many cases vertical blinds in the windows of the establishments frustratingly obstruct our view inside. And yet the visceral humanity of the content throbs from beneath and behind the formal elements.

Quirky handmade lettering on one storefront reads “Watch Me Grow” between two crudely painted but welcoming trees that disrupt the otherwise perfect bilateral symmetry of the spare storefront. Another photo is cropped to reveal only part of the center’s handmade signage. The lettering “…BABY” and “…G ACADEMY” hangs conspicuously against a frieze of vertical strips as regular and perfect as caring for children is irregular and imperfect.

The photographs send beautifully conflicting signals. One naturally wants into these spaces, physically, emotionally and psychically, but our urges are continually impeded by visual elements. The form becomes metaphor.

Naudi’s interpretations of Ciurej’s and Lochman’s photographs are scattered atop three shelved stations in the gallery. Each features loose pages of graph paper containing verse and prose passages, some hand written, some printed, with the strikethroughs and erasures indicative of a fitful editing session. They give off the manic energy of someone writing to catch up to a truth that will forever outrun their thoughts.
Naudi writes, “See them cradled in rectangular mangers/ these static tools of bisection/ units snapped from units/ autonomies sanctioned from and by you/ see your hand build the apparatus/ dividing into oblivion…”
Another passage reads,”…all is shared and all is deceit if not sensed lying down at the feet of our fixed fractals,” followed by the word “gestalt” repeated four times.

Randomly placed doodles of hands, lists and diagrams mingle with her cryptic copy. And the more you look, the more a picture begins to emerge. A picture of structure as both urban module and compositional device — a picture where the grid and communities of flesh aren’t mutually exclusive.
Gestalt indeed.

Naudi continues, “The shy temporal lobe collecting data like diamonds/ is compressed by neighborhoods/ gated as we peer/ between God’s venetian shackles”

“Variant” provides a bird’s eye view of the social question, offering not simply a perspective but a metaphorical bridge between multiple perspectives. Naudi’s scribblings and text go a step further. They paint a picture not only of social structures, but of complexity and emergence, where structure erupts from simplicity and repetition.
And still no consensus has been reached on how to resolve individual interests and social well being in a free society. So what is the future to hold for an art world more and more equipped and more and more inclined to take on the social question?

So, what will happen to our own motley feudal ties to the aesthetic past? Will traditional art making merge smoothly into a new age of connectivity, interactivity activism and what’s called social practice? Will aesthetics and social practice annihilate each other? Perhaps beauty and activism will simply live side-by side as unlikely admixtures." (Shane MacAdams) 

Lindsay (left) and Barb (right) standing next to
photos from their "Watch Me Grow" Series

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Exhibition - photo + craft event    

March 31- April 3, 2016

photo+craft, hosted by Warren Wilson College, is an unprecedented community arts event happening March 31—April 3, 2016 at multiple venues in downtown Asheville and the River Arts District.
Through exhibitions, talks, film and panel discussions, this cross-disciplinary festival explores visual and material culture in the 21st century by examining intersections between photography and craft.

April 1: Authentic Constructions exhibit as part of photo+craft symposium

Henco Gallery, Asheville SC
4:00-5:30pm

Authentic Constructions considers the multi dimensional world of photography and reveals its construction. On view March 31 – April 3. Participating Artists:Lindsay Lochman & Barbara Ciurej, Constance Thalken, Janelle Young, and Christina Z Anderson.

Lindsay with Art Widow, Molly Cassidy and Curator, Anna Helgeson

Photo + Craft  Schedule of Events: 

Friday April 1

 Exhibition and Opening Reception: “Authentic Constructions”

4-5:30pm

Keynote Speaker Fred Ritchin: “Bending the Frame: Photography and Social Change”

Broadway Arts Building
5:30-7pm
Reception 7-8:30pm

Dean of the School at International Center of Photography, Fred Ritchin has written and lectured internationally about the challenges and possibilities implicit in the digital revolution. Ritchin’s recent book, “Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen”, asks the question: how can images promote new thinking and make a difference in the world?

Saturday April 2
Workshop with Robert Asman: “Cameraless Photography: Silver Figurative Rendering Salon”

The Asheville Darkroom
9am-12pm 

 Presentation and Discussion:
“Making and Meaning: Photobooks and the Social Fabric” with Clarissa Sligh and Alejandro Cartagena (moderated by Eric Baden)

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
10am-11:30am

Internationally recognized artists Clarissa Sligh and Alejandro Cartagena show and talk about their work with photobooks, one of today’s most active and intimate forms of photographic practice. Cartagena’s self-published ‘Before the War’ was selected by both Time and Mother Jones as a 2015 best photobook of the year. Sligh’s new artist book, ‘Transforming Hate’, is set to be released the weekend of photo+craft. Both artists engage issues of contemporary social relevance in deeply personal ways. 

 Film Screening with Harvey Wang:
“From Darkroom to Daylight”

Altamont Theatre
1-2:30pm

Director Harvey Wang to introduce his documentary film featuring interviews with more than 20 important figures in the field of photography about the digital revolution and how this has impacted their work.

 Panel Discussion:
“Ghosts in the Machine: Finding Craft in the Digital” with James Huckenpahler, Vesna Pavlović, and Elijah Gowin
(moderated by Bernard Welt)

Altamont Theatre
2:30-4pm

This panel of working practioners discusses not only finding visual form within the digital medium, but also carefully considers the ideas that surround the materiality of photography and what craft means when working with 1s and 0s.

Keynote Speaker Namita Gupta Wiggers: “Almost Touch + Virtual Communities: Photo+Craft”

CCCD Upstairs Ballroom
5-6:30pm

Namita Gupta Wiggers, curator, educator and director/co-founder of Critical Craft Forum, asks: how does photography operate in conjunction with the handmade object? When photography – and social media – are the primary vehicles for communicating about objects, how is photography creating craft  communities?

photo+craft Celebration and Exhibition Opening: “Phantom Practices”

REVOLVE

8pm onward

A reception for “Phantom Practices”, an exhibition with works by 9 of the photo+craft presenters at REVOLVE including the panelists, Clarissa Sigh, Harvey Wang, Courtney Dodd, Robert Asman, Clay Harmon, and Alejandro Cartagena.

Sunday April 3
“Building a Collection: A Conversation with David Raymond, Hedy Fischer and Randy Shull”
(moderated by David J. Brown)

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
11-12:30pm

These prominent collectors (Raymond, Fischer and Shull) discuss how they identified, formed and developed their passion for contemporary art and photography, then worked with museums as a way to share and extend their vision.

Sponsored by
Warren Wilson College

photo+craft
Asheville, NC

photocraftavl.com

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March 2016   Exhibition - The Same But Different 

The Same But Different 
NYC4PA  Gallery
New York City
Jurored exhibition by Darren Ching, Klompching Gallery

View this gallery for a great array of picturing difference!
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February 15 - March 9, 2016  

Exhibition - Joyce Elaine Grant Photography Exhibit

Texas Woman’s University’s

 15th Annual Joyce Elaine Grant Photography Show
East | West Galleries 
Department of Visual Arts / Fine Arts Building / Denton, Texas


Exhibition Dates: February 15 to March 9, 2016
Juried Exhibition by Dr. Rebecca Senf

Light Leaked interviewed Dr. Rebecca Senf, the Norton Family Curator of Photography, on her process behind jurying the Joyce Elaine Grant Exhibition at Texas Woman's University that will run until March 9, 2016.

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February 2016  

 Publication - Feed a Different Imagination has arrived! 

Processed Views was selected from the ExpoMilan15 campaign to be featured in the beautifully produced Feed A Different Imagination book.
You can purchase a copy here!
Proceeds from the sale will help to buy vaccinations for polio to ensure that less children will suffer from this terrible disease. 

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January 2016 

Publication - Lenscratch States Project - 

Watch Me Grow

Kevin Miyazaki of Collect.Give invited us to be part of the Lenscratch States Project highlighting photographers from Wisconsin. Kevin visited the studio and took a portrait of us in front of the ancestor wall.

Watch Me Grow was featured.

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January 1, 2016    

Wishing you a wild ride into 2016!