Penelope Umbrico

Penelope Umbrico attended the Ontario College of Art for her undergraduate degree and then attended the School of Visual Arts in New York city for her masters in fine art. She is a very successful artist. She has had numerous solo exhibitions as well as group exhibitions in places such as New York, California and Brazil. Photography is her medium as well as her subject. She is probably most famously known for her "suns from Flicker" exhibition. 

She describes herself as a photographer but more so as a compiler of images. "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." She likes to focus on photographs on the World Wide Web. Specifically images of things that are collectively photographed. For example: suns, televisions, copiers, photo producing machines etc. She describes her work as "an accumulation that navigates between consumer and producer, materiality and immateriality, and individual and collective expression." This absolutely comes across in her work because she is appropriating images of items that are either in every house hold like televisions, or things that everyone has seen in their lives. When talking about the flicker sun images it is a cliche image that most people take. Sunsets are probably one of the most common photos that people whip out their cell phones to take. She finds it interesting how our culture takes photos to be unique and show individuality when in the end the device they are using to take the photos are set up very systematically. Here is her description of this "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." I see her point in this and agree that cameras/camera phones are all set up with micro chips to function and perform in a certain way. It takes a DSLR on manual settings in order to create more individual images. Yet even then you are using a mechanical device that was formulated very mathematically and mass produced. Will we ever be individuals again in this world surrounded by technology?

The works of Umbrico's that I find most interesting are the Flicker suns, the craigslist TV's and the broken TV sets on Ebay. I find these interesting because when people took these images their goal was to be unique. When a person takes a sunset photo is is very spur of the moment trying to catch the light and color before it disappears. The TV's on craigslist are put up to sell, usually placed and commented on as different then the next guy, this is in order to sell the item. The Tv sets that are broken were the most interesting to me because of the colorful designs in the images. I like the wide variety of images yet in the end they are all images of the same thing....a broken tv screen. I think she is a good appropriation artist and I know it took her extensive amounts of time to put these shows together. 


I find this related to my work and this project 1 because I am using found images of St. Mary's sunsets to place in the backdrop of the google maps 3D model. Umbrico's suns from flicker is what inspired me. I was originally going to construct a work very similar to hers in grid form but then decided to make it more complex. 

In the end I like her work and am interested in seeing what she produces next

http://www.penelopeumbrico.net/Info/Words.html