Gallery artist Penelope Umbrico currently has work on view at the Photographer’s Gallery in London (UK). Titled “Sun/Screen” (2014), the new media project will remain on view through January 18, 2015. Says the gallery:
“Sun/Screen is a new project by award-winning New York based artist Penelope Umbrico, which continues her exploration of the ever increasing production and consumption of photographic images online. Umbrico used an iPhone to re-photograph images of the sun she cropped from thousands of sunset images shared on the web. The process of capturing images directly from the computer screen creates a moiré pattern – an optical illusion, which is the consequence of the pixel grids, meshes or dot patterns being superimposed. As the images dissolve into one another, they draw attention to the materiality of the screen and further distances us from the natural sunlight source of the original images.”
The project was recently reviewed by the New Yorker, which declared:
“In the group exhibition ‘Social Media,’ at the Pace/MacGill Gallery in 2011, one of the most arresting works on display was Penelope Umbrico’s project ‘Sunset Portraits from 9,623,557 Flickr Sunset Pictures on 8/22/11.’ Umbrico, a New York City-based photographer, had collected a thousand and fifty-eight Flickr photos of people posing in front of the sun, then mounted them in an abstract grid of black silhouettes against colorful backgrounds.
In a new solo exhibition, ‘Sun/Screen,’ at the Photographers’ Gallery, in London, Umbrico further explores her interest in sunset photographs and the ways in which they are shared on the Internet. She used an iPhone to re-photograph images of the sun she found online, and, in the exhibit, she displays them as a single slide show. The dissolve from one image into another enhances the moiré effect of the digital photos, creating what Umbrico calls ‘a virtual window onto a natural world made un-natural.'”
We congratulate Penelope on this wonderful development in her work, and encourage you to see this project – should you find yourself in London this winter. For more information about the artist, or available work, please email info@markmooregallery.com.
Mark Moore Fine Art Blog 