PREPARED GUITAR: Penelope umbrico

Penelope Umbrico

All Catalogs (A-Z), 2002-03

All Catalogs (A-Z) is a text piece that is comprised of the names of all the available mail-order catalogs listed on the internet (15,194 in total, at time of compiling on 2/25/02). This first page links to separate pages for each letter of the alphabet, on which I have randomly selected companies and created links to their sites, with no attempt at curating for content.

http://www.penelopeumbrico.net/AllCatalogs/AllCat_Index.html

Penelope Umbrico is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Her photo-based installations, video, and digital media works explore the ever-increasing production and consumption of images on the Internet. Utilizing photo-sharing and consumer websites as an expansive archive, she navigates between producer and consumer, local and global, and the individual and the collective, with attention to the technologies that produce (and are produced by) these forces.
Umbrico has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, including in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; MassMoCA, MA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Le Mois de Photo a Montreal Photo Festival, Canada; Alt. +1000 Festival de Photographie, Rossinière, Switzerland; Lodz, Poland; and Foto Colectania, Barcelona, Spain, among many others. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a John Gutmann Photography Fellowship Award, a Deutsche Bank Fellowship, New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, a Peter S Reed Grant, an Anonymous Was A Woman Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and an Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship.

Some notes on my work

Photography is as much the subject of my work as it is the medium in which I work. I employ traditional photographic techniques and methods of appropriation, extraction, multiple production, and intervention, to explore how we, as a culture, make and use images.

My focus on collective practices in photography has led me to examine subjects that are collectively photographed. I take the sheer quantity of images online as a collective archive that represents us - a constantly changing auto-portrait. I view all visual expression within this collectively emergent environment as potential for social signs that hint at something other than what they depict. The work is an accumulation that navigates between consumer and producer, materiality and immateriality, and individual and collective expression.

The idea of absence and erasure is a constant theme in my work, especially with regard to the popular uses of technologies in photography and on the Internet that seem to promise visibility, community and intimacy. I question the idea of the democratization of media, where pre-scripted images, made with tools programmed to function in predetermined ways, claim to foster subjectivity and individuality.
In much of my work I address how differently an image functions on the internet than in physical time/space, the shifts in meaning around the subject depicted in the image in both contexts, and what happens to the image's perceived value when transcribed from web-based to print-based media.

I have begun to see some of the objects pictured in the images I find as the aftermath and by-products of Modernism. These images register the disparity between an optimistic Modernism (the seduction of clean emptied space; promises of efficiency and productivity; the mass-production and availability of everything) and the dystopic result (technological breakdown, ecological disaster, social alienation).