Photo Show at MoCP Chicago La Frontera: the cultural impact of Mexican migration

La Frontera: the Cultural Impact of Mexican Migration
Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago
Curator: Rod Slemmons
Through December 23, 2010

 

DAVID TAYLOR, Pedestrian Fence Construction, NM, 2007,
34×43”, Archival Inkjet Print
Courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago

 

Work by: Michael Hyatt - Andy Kropa - Yoshua Okón - Heriberto Quiroz - Juan Pacheco - Antonio Perez - David Rochkind - Marcela Taboada - David Taylor

The idea for this exhibition originated when MoCP Director Rod Slemmons served as a member of the Mexican Community Roundtable of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He realized that there were many layers and generations of migration and immigration present at the table, all with varying agendas and degrees of mutual understanding and tolerance. He felt that these multiple viewpoints were quite different from the simple, commonly held notions of immigration promulgated by the news media in the U.S. 

With experience working within arts communities in Mexico for 25 years, and familiarity with photographers dealing with these issues in both the U.S. and Mexico, Slemmons created this exhibition to explore the following layers of impact of immigration over time and in detail. 

The exhibition addresses the dynamics of the border itself as the choke point, including Minute Men, Border Patrol, and humanitarian groups. This section will primarily be drawn from the work of David Taylor from Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Michael Hyatt from Tucson, Arizona. David Taylor has just published a book titled Working the Line that records his extensive experience with the Border Patrol.

La Frontera also explores the routes to the border in Mexico collectively called El Camino Real, an ironic reference to the 17th century route from Mexico City to California. Some of these routes are illegal and exploitive of the people desperately seeking work in the north. This situation is exacerbated by the increasing volume of drug trafficking that is permanently changing the cultural parameters of Mexico forever. David Rochkind contributes a strong image essay from his project Heavy Hand, Sunken Spirit.

Transformed communities on either side of the border are a focus as well. An example is the town of West Liberty, Iowa, which has been photographed extensively by Andy Kropa. The town has been home to Mexican farm workers since the 1940s, of whom almost all hail from the town of Allende in the Mexican state of Durango. Unlike previous waves of immigrants from Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who had no desire to return, there is constant contact between the two towns.  A less-positive example of the effects of migration, especially of men looking for work, is the town of San Miguel Amatilan in the state of Oaxaca. Here women have been forced to take over traditional male occupations such as building houses of adobe, mainly because the majority of the men have moved to the U.S. in search of work and have not come back. Marcela Taboada contributes a project based on this town called Women of Clay.

La Frontera includes photographs from Chicago exploring the lives of families in different waves of immigration who are now living in Pilsen, produced by Antonio Perez and Heriberto Quiroz. The exhibition also addresses Mexican artists in the U.S. who attempt to escape the expectation that they deal only with "Mexican themes," while they still experience being foreigners in a foreign land. Juan Pacheco contributes a project called De Colores, and Yoshua Okón contributes an installation about an imaginary factory on the border that "cans" laughter. 

ROD SLEMMONS is the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. From 1982 to 1996 he was the Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Seattle Art Museum, and from 1996 to 2002 he taught Photography, the History of Photography, and Graduate Museum Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. He was the National Chair of the Society for Photographic Education from 1990 to 1994. He has served as a peer review panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and as a grant reader and site evaluator for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has organized numerous exhibitions including: Diane Arbus (1986); Like a One-Eyed Cat, a 30-year retrospective of the photography of Lee Friedlander (1989); Shadowy Evidence: The Art of E. S. Curtis and His Contemporaries (1989); Persistence of Vision, a retrospective of the digital work of Paul Berger (2003); and Witness: Contemporary Mexican Journalism (2004). His essays and reviews have appeared in dozens of publications including Afterimage, Black Flash, image, and Reflex. 

La Frontera: the Cultural Impact of Mexican Migration
October 8 - December 23, 2010

MoCP – Museum of Contemporary Photography
Columbia College Chicago
Chicago IL 60605 - USA

www.mocp.org

Czech Photography – MoCP Chicago - Anne and Jacques Baruch Collection Exhibition

The Anne and Jacques Baruch Collection of Czech Photography: Recent Acquisitions
Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago
January 29 - March 28, 2010

 JAROSLAV ROSSLER, Untitled, 1927

Courtesy Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago

Gift of The Baruch Foundation

In conjunction with the Contemporary Czech Photography exhibition (previous post), the Museum of Contemporary Photography highlight works from the Baruch Collection which were gifted to the museum in 2009.  The exhibition includes works by Vaclav Chochola, František Drtikol, Josef Ehm, Jaromir Funke, Emila Medkova, Jaroslav Rössler, Jan Saudek, Adolf Schneeberger, and Josef Sudek.

The Czech Republic has an incredibly rich photographic tradition. At the turn of the 20th century, professional photographers such as František Drtikol and Josef Sudek joined their European counterparts in exploring experimental techniques to achieve artistic goals, in a movement that came to be known as Pictorialism. In the 1920s and 30s, a group of artists including Jaroslav Rössler and Jaromir Funke began creating highly experimental works influenced by French Surrealism and Russian Constructivism. Often combining elements of montage and abstraction, these avant garde masters became influential worldwide. After World War II, as artists were forced to grapple with pressures from the government, experimentation continued and imaginative and surreal photography grew strong underground and were used to subtly counter political ideology.  Simultaneously, the social documentary tradition thrived, exemplified in the work of Viktor Kolář and Jindrich Streit, who documented the often trying social circumstances. The Baruchs promoted, sold, and collected it all. 

Anne and Jacques Baruch began collecting work by Czech artists in 1968 during a visit to Prague and ended up becoming a window and a voice for the artists following Soviet occupation beginning the same year. Since many of the artists the Baruchs wanted to work with were not sanctioned by the authorities, Anne began smuggling art out of the country, often at great risk to everyone involved. Although government agents would seal her packages of officially sanctioned art before her departure, she would often alter or remake the seals with the help of artists in order to add more to her packages. She always traveled to Prague with a bright red Hartman suitcase equipped with a false bottom. On the way there she would fill it with art supplies that the artists could not buy, and on the return it would have artworks hidden inside. Once she was questioned by the FBI at her gallery, and once she was detained at the Prague airport and questioned at length. She even came up with a code that she used to correspond with artists and take notes about pricing and exhibition details. Through her travels Anne amassed a remarkable collection of both historical and contemporary Czech photography.

MoCP – Museum of Contemporary Photography

Columbia College Chicago, Chicago IL 60605

www.mocp.org

Contemporary Czech Photography - MoCP Exhibition, Chicago

50% Grey:
Contemporary Czech Photography Reconsidered
Štěpán Grygar, Jasanský / Polák, Markéta Othová,
Michal Pěchouček, Jiří Thýn
Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago
Curators: Karen Irvine and Karel Cisář
January 29 - March 28, 2010

 

MARKETA OTHOVA , Untitled, 2008
Courtesy of the artist and Jiří Svestka Gallery, Prague 

50% Grey: Contemporary Czech Photography Reconsidered at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, brings together the work of six contemporary Czech photographers (two of whom work collaboratively), all of whom reflect on the varied materials of photography and find poetic resonance in a lack of obviously-poetic subject matter. Instead, they investigate the potential for photographic veracity, by pushing the idea of framing and selection to counter any perceived objectivity the medium might have. Instead of creating brightly colored, large, splashy digital works that dominate much of contemporary photography, they make quieter works, generally gelatin silver prints using traditional chemistry and film, a trademark that extends the rich black and white photographic tradition of their country. However, this exhibition does not argue that these artists are primarily influenced by their nationality; rather, it is intended only partly to consider how the pallor of historical circumstance, in this case a stereotypically “grey” post-communist society, might impact artistic production, as well as how a nationalist label affects an artist and an exhibition in a more general sense. 

JASANSKY / POLAK (Lukas Jasanský, b. 1965; Martin Polák, b. 1966)  have been working as an artist team since they studied together in the 1990s. They were both interested in departing from the tradition of extreme subjectivity that dominated Czech fine art photography at the time, and instead began to pursue a practice based more on discourse. After years of working together on many conceptual, technically straightforward, projects, they were commissioned in 2007 to make art at the European Parliament in Brussels. They noticed that  the gifts on display from various nations, artworks  that  were meant as representative examples of  cultural production from the countries, often had the feeling of political tools in their conservatism, symbolism, or grandeur. Jasanský/Polák level the playing field between the works by shooting them all in an unembellished, deadpan style and in black and white. Their perceived objectivism is perhaps a fitting metaphor for the desired diplomacy of the European parliament. Jasanský/Polák also investigate the potential of photography to straddle the representational and the abstract in their series  Abstraction (1994-95). By attempting to make images that recall abstract compositions using everyday objects and settings, Jasanský/Polák underscore the cultural knowledge of what an abstract image looks like. Color, often a significant and rather pleasing attribute of abstract art, is siphoned out of the scene, turning the pictures into a more controlled, almost scientific, endeavor. In their critique there is irony, as they hint at the absurdity of making abstract art with photography. 

STEPAN GRYGAR (b. 1956) - Compared to Jasanský/Polák, Grygar’s work sits in a middle ground, in pictures where the abstraction and representational elements are deliberately leveled, with each alternately holding more weight. In Street (Prague), 2002, a series of black and white images shot out of a window of the street below during a snowstorm, the images are easily readable, in a manner similar to Jasanský/Polákʼs “abstractions.” But displayed as a series of seven images, the graphic, patterned quality of the snow dominates as the background fades more or less away.  In his other works, Grygar builds abstract images for the camera, employing materials such as flour, paper, and light as well as unusual camera angles to create graphic images that defy the flatness of photography  and create optically intricate compositions, much in the tradition of the avant-garde photographers of the 1920s and '30s. He is not interested in abstraction for the sake of ornamentation or decoration, but rather as a means for illuminating the perceptual process. 

JIRI THYN (b. 1977) also works directly with abstraction, raising questions about the limitations of photography along the way. In his works that inspired the title of this exhibition, 50% Grey (2008), he disrupts the illusion of photography by bringing its science and materials to the fore. In one part of the series, he constructs “negatives” out of layered glass sheets silkscreened with blocks of bright color. He then exposes black and white photographic paper using the color block negatives, a process that creates different shades of grey depending on exposure time. The work is always displayed as two parts, the stratified “negative” and its corresponding photogram, a presentation strategy that reveals the reduction of information that is photography as well as the instability of the notion of the artwork. His title, 50% Grey, is reminiscent of the idea of the perfect negative and print sought after by practitioners such as Ansel Adams, who taught that one ideally exposes for "middle Grey," but  that each situation requires a fair amount of tweaking based on the specifics of the scene, and that there has to be room for intuition and experimentation.

MARKETA OTHOVA (b. 1968) - Leçon de Photographie (2007), is composed of seven pictures that depict a white box against a white background. The color of the captured object is no different from its surroundings, so that one would expect it to remain invisible – and yet it turns out to be set off by the shading that outlines the silhouette. Thus, we end up seeing the object in the photograph only due to the difference injected into it by photography. This is also made explicit in the untitled diptych of a floral still life from 2008. Here, Othová has captured one and the same bunch of flowers, first against a dark and then against a light background, with the object thus being captured as light-colored in the first photograph and dark-colored in the second. Combined in a single installation, we tend to consider these two independent images merely as a positive and a negative.  The stability of the visual world is most forcefully disrupted in another untitled diptych, this time from 2000. Through painting, Othová links two perfectly distinct photographs in such a way that we consider them identical. Othová has achieved this effect by means of a geometrically reductive painting that leaves only a small cut-out in the middle of the first image ––a segment that appears to fit into the blind spot in the second pictureʼs painted area. 

MICHAL PECHOUCEK (b. 1973) - Filmogram #1 (2007) is a set of twenty-four dyptichs of two views of an interior space, shot once every hour for an entire day, for a total of forty-eight exposures. The title of the piece,  Filmogram, is a play on the word “photogram,” or an image made by placing objects directly on photographic paper and exposing it to light, thus circumventing the use of a camera and film. By making twenty four exposures a day, and exhibiting them in a row, he makes reference to the fact that film is generally comprised of twenty-four frames per second.  Pěchouček is not only a photographer, but has spent most of his artistic career making multi-media works that combine elements of film, painting and performance. Pěchoučekʼs video Pater Noster (2005), references the first two words of the Lordʼs Prayer, and are also used to describe the old-fashioned elevators in Europe that do not stop but continually rotate in a circle, like the motion of a rosary in someoneʼs hands. As the action plays out in the seemingly frozen time and space of still images, it is complicated by the footageʼs up and down scrolling, creating a matrix of duration and direction for the viewer to navigate.

KAREN IRVINE is the curator of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago. She has organized numerous exhibitions including:  Audible Imagery: Sound and Photography; Anthony Goicolea; Tracey Baran; Scott Fortino; Shirana Shahbazi: Goftare Nik/Good Words; Jason Salavon; Jin Lee; Paul Shambroom: Evidence of Democracy; Alec Soth: Sleeping by the Mississippi; The Furtive Gaze; and  Camera/Action: Performance and Photography, among others. She is a part-time instructor of photography at Columbia College Chicago. She received her MFA in photography from FAMU, Prague and her MA in art history from the University of Illinois at Chicago.  

KAREL CISAR is a guest co-curator for 50% Grey. He has been assistant professor of aesthetics and art theory at Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague since 2008. He curated the 5th and 6th Biennial of the Young Artists (2005 and 2008) and the Prague Biennale 2 (2005), as well as exhibitions with Hans-Peter Feldmann, Markéta Othová, Mathias Poledna, Florian Pumhösl and Robin Rhode. A contributor to Camera Austria, Flash Art and Tema Celeste, he is also the editor of Text and Work: The Menard Case (2004) and What is Photography? (2004). He has studied Philosophy at Charles University in Prague and University of Geneva.

50% GREY: CONTEMPORARY CZECH PHOTOGRAPHY RECONSIDERED
January 29 - March 28, 2010

MoCP – Museum of Contemporary Photography
Columbia College Chicago
600 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago IL 60605 - USA

www.mocp.org