Conference 2008: Image Maker Presentations
Code Words: Dissolving a Practice of Photography in Technological Terms
Presenter: Lori Hepner, Assistant Professor of Integrative Arts, Penn State Greater Allegheny
Synopsis:
The body of work, Code Words, shows the disintegration of the mediums of photography, digital imaging, and conceptual art for the purpose of forwarding a discussion of binary code and its invisible takeover of visual and written communications. Code Words focuses on the break down of language through its conversion to binary code by employing abstract representations of the “one” and “zero” in photographic forms.
The work slows down the quickening pace of digital communications through real-time performances of a chemical breakdown of organic material that is photographed as performance documentation. The prints are then arranged in large-scale, multiple-print installations that drift from the traditional boundaries of the medium of photography.
Bio:
Lori Hepner is an interdisciplinary artist who has been working through ideas of the translation of code through performance, video, and photography installations through the Code Words body of work. Her work has been shown in exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art; The Westmoreland Museum of American Art; the Museum of Art of Calda in Manizales, Columbia; the Haggerty Gallery at the University of Dallas; the Fox Art Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania; the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art; the Boston Cyberarts Festival; the FirstWorksProv Festival; and the 2008 Three Rivers Arts Festival.
Lori received a M.F.A in Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005 and a B.F.A in Fine Art Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology in 2003. Lori currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA, where she holds the position of Assistant Professor of Integrative Arts at Penn State Greater Allegheny.
Extending the Photographic Image: The World Wide Web and our New Sense of Place
Presenter: Michael Sherwin, Assistant Professor of Photography and Digital Imaging at West Virginia University
Synopsis:
Recent developments in technology are expanding the ways in which we experience the concept of distance. Webcams, online mapping, and video sharing websites are allowing artists, amateurs, and armchair cartographers to chart the intangibility of place, etching their own impressions, emotions, and experiences onto the physical world around them. Embracing this new paradigm, this presentation will explore my recent work created using appropriated web based imagery, as well as highlighting other conceptual artists that are extending and redefining conceptions of landscape, distance and place through the medium of photography.
Bio:
After eight years in the Northwest, Michael returned to the East in 2007 to accept the position of Assistant Professor of Photography and Digital Imaging at West Virginia University. Originally from Southwestern Ohio, Michael Sherwin received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from The Ohio State University in 1999, and in June of 2004 he received his Master of Fine Arts in Photography from the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon.
As an artist, Sherwin is interested in exploring the technical and conceptual periphery of the medium of photography through traditional and digital methods, as well as video. He has won numerous grants and awards for his work, and has been exhibited widely. He is also an active and participating member of the Society for Photographic Education, and the College Art Association.
web+cam(era)
Presenter: Rob Straw
Synopsis:
Light is something that photographs have captured for well over a century and it is now channeled through cable, telephone and fiber optic lines that “connect” people to the world around them. Webcams stream live video from multiple locations throughout the world to your computer or mobile device. Instead of just using my phone or computer as a way to a capture or edit images, they have became a portals to lenses focused on areas throughout the world.
Instead of photographing what is physically in front of me, I’ve chosen to observe and photograph the people, places, lives and moments that are oceans away. As a result I became more conscious of the “here and now” and gained an awareness of a global simultaneity of events that I never fully recognized until I opened multiple internet windows at once and saw it raining in Munich and snowing in Alaska.
Bio:
Rob Straw originally studied video at an undergraduate level and though that time-based medium has been left behind in favor of photography, its influence remains in his “still” work. The geographic isolation of living in central Illinois led to the use of webcams in late 2003 and resulted in a body of work that was somewhat removed from traditional photography when he completed his M.F.A. from Illinois State University in 2005.
He currently lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and has taught at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh since 2006 in the area of traditional darkroom photography. Though technology is used in much of his work, the darkroom print is often the preferred method of output for his work to create a dialogue between past and present photographic techniques.
PHOTOGRAPHY: IS IT THE TRUTH YET?
Presenter: Calla Thompson, University of Maryland, Baltimore
Synopsis:
I have all but stopped shooting photographs. I collect and manipulate photographs to make photographs. I draw photographically to make photographs. Martha Rosler was quoted as saying that, “If we want to call up hopeful or positive uses of manipulated images, we must choose images in which manipulation is itself apparent, and not just as a form of artistic reflexivity but as a way to make a larger point about the truth value of photographs and the illusionist elements in the surface of (and even the definition of) ‘reality’.”
My photographic techniques, in conjunction with in the excess of images on the internet allow me to combine the ‘reality’ of appropriated imagery with imaginary spaces and scenarios. This upending of any photographic authority is intrinsic to the broader discussion of agency, power, and good and evil in which my work participates.
Bio:
Thompson’s works have been exhibited throughout the United States and Canada, as well as in South America, including solo exhibitions in Toronto at The Centre for Contemporary Photography and Open Studio Gallery, as well as in New York City at Soho 20. Group exhibitions include those at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the International Photography Biennial by invitation of the Centro Colombo Americano de Medellin, Columbia, The Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, The Painted Bride Arts Center, the Everson Museum of Art, and the Korean Cultural Center Gallery of Los Angeles. Thompson’s work has appeared in catalogues and more recently in Robert Hirsh’s book Light and Lens: Photography in the Digital Age.
She received her MFA in Photography from Syracuse University and her BFA in Photography from the University of Ottawa (Canada). She is a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) where she teaches in both undergraduate Photography and the graduate Imaging and Digital Arts program.
