Penelope Umbrico

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Submitted by Magenta on Thu, 02/09/2012 - 18:24

Portfolios

Penelope Umbrico’s Broken Sets (eBay) are cropped from images of broken LCD TV screens Umbrico found on eBay, where they are sold for parts. The sellers turn on the TVs while photographing them so that potential buyers can see that the electronics behind the screens work. Umbrico became interested in the incidental abstract beauty of the screens because they are derived from the breakdown and failure of their own promising technology. By presenting these inadvertent abstract compositions as formal compositions in their own right, Umbrico collapses the obsolescence and breakdown of new technology with the aesthetic formalism of utopian Modernist abstraction.

Umbrico’s work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at BAM, Brooklyn; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Pingyao International Photography Festival, Pingyao, China; Foto-Festival, Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, Germany; Aperture Foundation Gallery, New York; New York Photography Festival ; and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia. She is currently faculty at the School of Visual Arts, NYC and the Chair of MFA Photography at Bard College.

Images courtesy p|m Gallery, Toronto. All images 2009-2010, Digital C prints on metallic Fuji paper, 30 x 40 inches, editions of 5.

Published in Magenta Magazine Online, Winter 2012, Volume 3, No. 1

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