Penelope Umbrico

press release: From May 5 to Aug. 7, 2016, the Milwaukee Art Museum will present Penelope Umbrico: Future Perfect, the first major museum exhibition of New York-based photographer Penelope Umbrico. An artist whose career spans the advent of the Internet, Umbrico mines the flood of images shared on Craigslist, Flickr, and other social media sites, and appropriates them as source material for her work. Thinking about why we take photographs and share them, she creates large-scale installations that reveal contemporary society’s collective photographic habits and the underlying desires that shape them.

Future Perfect features over thirty photo-based installations—comprising nearly 5,000 individual images along with photographs, videos and books that trace Umbrico’s obsessive systems of inquiry and online research since 2006.  The exhibition will also feature new work made specifically for Milwaukee, alongside the artist’s most acclaimed projects from the past decade. Highlights include:

-       The ever-expanding, Suns from Sunsets from Flickr (2006-ongoing), in which Umbrico prints suns cropped from over 28 million sunset photographs on Flickr, as well as the evolving projects it is has inspired over the past ten years.

-      Tvs from Craigslist (2008 – ongoing), revealing accidental self-portraits and intimate details in reflections in the screens of television for sale online.

-      Broken Sets (eBay) (2008 –ongoing), Umbrico’s use of the abstract compositions displayed in the broken LCD screens  that collapse the obsolescence and breakdown of new technology with the visionary aesthetic of Modernism.

-      Range: of Masters of Photography (2012-ongoing), for which she re-photographs the mountain images of iconic photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, transforming them through hundreds of smart phone photo filter apps, to emerge fluorescent and warped.

By meticulously documenting where she found and how she manipulated each image, Umbrico also raises questions about fair use, ownership and creative expression in an age when everyone takes photographs.

“Penelope Umbrico is part of the first generation of artists to explore photography’s transition to digital,” said Lisa J. Sutcliffe, Milwaukee Art Museum’s curator of photography and media arts.  “At first glance, her enigmatic installations are abstract, and seductively beautiful, but they also reinvent and challenge the way we understand photography as a medium.”

Future Perfect is the first solo exhibition by a contemporary artist in the Museum’s new Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts, a 10,000 square-foot foot space devoted to a global array of photography, film, video installation, and media art. The exhibition is supported by the Herzfeld Foundation.

The Museum is open Tuesday–Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on Fridays until 8 p.m. Admission is $17 for adults; $15 for students, seniors and active military; and free for Members and children age 12 and under. The first Friday of each month is Meijer Free First Friday and Museum admission is free.