Penelope Umbrico's TV's from Craig's List
I discovered Penelope Umbrico at the Center For Creative Photography Edge of Vision exhibit of abstract photography. From across the gallery, I spotted a wall full of small work that seemed to be emanating a kind of haunted presence. Dark images in a variety of size glowed with barely discernable traces of hidden environments. As I stepped closer to the images, I was immediately mesmerized by them. They were very dark and abstracted images that were some kind of intimate interior spaces. A blurred reflection of light emitted from the center or margins of the images. Little pieces of light seeped into the images from interior surfaces - a window, a picture frame, a glass. As I studied them I began to notice the hint of a half-parted curtain or the edge of a bed. Corners of rooms and a slight wrinkle in a bed sheet came into a blurred focus. The images possessed tremendous aura and atmosphere, yet there was also a sense of disquiet in the images, a trespass, like I was looking into the private lives of people without people in them. I could not stop looking, and it was the half-light that made the looking so compelling, the fact that things came in and out of focus, that the interiors were swallowed by dark with just a blurring trace of light at the margins or one bright smudge of light in the center. The fact that the interiors were so obscured is what made their contents resonate with such human presence even though humans are completely absent from the images. I could feel the lives that have existed in those spaces and traced them inside the edges and corners that blurred in and out of focus.
Though I am not a fan of digitally manipulated photography and definitely prefer photography shot on film, Umbrico’s obviously digitalized photographs somehow managed to incorporate the digital process to create an aura out of it. She used digital processing to actually bring a kind of haunted life to her images. Giant blurred pixilated squares blur across the surface of her images and create a sense that the environments contained in her photographs are actually transmitting the psychic contents of their interior spaces. The obvious presence of digital “transmission” gives the photographs a kind of ectoplasmic evidence of the ghosts lurking in the dark corners of the spaces.
I thought all these things before I actually learned what I was looking at. I’m glad I had a chance to digest Umbrico’s work before actually having any knowledge of what her project is because once I learned about the theory of her project, my initial “virgin” perception shifted. The project is called For Sale/TVs from Craigslist, and what I was looking at were the interiors of people’s spaces as reflected in the screens of their television sets which were being sold on Craig’s List. Umbrico took the images from Craig’s list and then manipulated them to create these intimate interior portraits out of “found images.” She then cropped the images to only include the screen and the reflection of the environment and then sized them and priced them according to the actual TV being sold.
This project is fascinating on so many levels. First of all, I love the pieces purely as aesthetic objects. There is something so incredibly hollowly beautiful in the images. I think that the haunted feel that I get from them is because the images are being transmitted by a discarded piece of consumer culture (a TV for sale), so they are like reflections from the face of a ghost, but the ghost is a television set. Think of all the eyes that have stared at the TV while it sat in that room. Are all those eyes contained within that dark screen? I can almost see the ghost a body sitting on the edge of the bed watching the screen. But there is another layer of meaning since the TV is an object whose purpose in to transmit signals. Since the power is “off,” it is only able to transmit the image of the environment it occupies, so it becomes a kind of living ghost, no longer transmitting from the outside but from the inside. Likewise, since Umbrico uses images she finds on the internet, there is also another “remove” from the original object, causing yet another layer of distortion in the transmission. There are so many levels of “noise” and “distortion” in the way the images are brought to us, and that is what makes them so beautiful. They seem to continue to shift and almost generate an electric field, just like when you touch your fingers to a TV screen after you turn it off, and you can feel the electricity with your fingertips.
Of course, given that Umbrico uses images from the internet to create her work, this project also opens up all kinds of issues of propriety, trespass and boundaries. Once someone posts an image of something from their lives onto something like Craig’s List, does it become public domain? Certainly the individuals who posted the TVs expected people to only see a television set for sale. But Umbrico has drilled into these images and excavated a hidden interior space. It’s like she took a magnifying glass and honed in on such tight focus that she revealed the secret hidden places inside, which in this case are the homes of the people who own the TVs. Because the images are so abstract, there are no identifiers in the images. They are purely generic, and that is why they are so effective. We can only “guess” what environment we are looking at. Still, they are reflections of someone’s private space, so Umbrico’s work is interesting to think about with some other things I’ve been pondering about where we draw the boundary line when photographing people or their environments without consent. ( See what I wrote on Anthony Hernandez here.)
I intended to include some thoughts on a couple of other photographers and other issues in this post, but as it turns out, my workday is not going to allow for that, so just consider this another installment on the whole issues of photography and private/public access.
I’ll be back later with the next installment.
Ciao.
KDD
Penelope Umbrico's Artist Statement:
TVs From Craigslist, are images of the screens of TVs for sale I found on Craigslist. With hints of the seller’s interior space reflected in them, they offer inadvertent glimpses of intimacy and function as self-portraits of the sellers (the camera’s flash announcing the seller’s presence in the image). These unconsidered images almost seem like pleas for attention. If you look closely you can find, hidden in them, little gestures of private exposure to the great anonymous "out there". I isolate the site of these gestures to expose the promise, and ultimate absence, of intimacy that the internet fosters.
I download the images, crop all but the screen, enlarge each to scale and print an edition of 2 of each (the prints range in size from 8"x10" to 16"x20"). During an exhibition, I upload the images to Craigslist (http://www.craigslist.org/) in the city the exhibition is taking place and list them under the heading "TVs for sale". There, the first edition of each of the prints is available for purchase for the price of the original TV (ranging anywhere from $10-$300). The second edition becomes available for purchase at gallery prices after the Craigslist edition is sold.
As a kind of public art TVs From Craigslist utilizes the public domain both for its content and its context. On Craisglist, the work is a collaboration between the artist and the gallery, addressing issues of exchange: how differently a piece works on the internet than it does in real time/space, and what happens to the perceived value of a work, and its meaning, when it is transcribed from web-based media to print-based media, and visa-versa. There the juxtaposition of the art market with a consumer market engages an unsuspecting consumer public and asks it to consider the value of an art object (made from its own visual vocabulary) to be as worthy of their attention as the consumer object they hope to acquire.
--Penelope Umbrico