Penelope Umbrico

Courtesy of the artist.

Penelope Umbrico examines the volume and ubiquity of images in contemporary culture. She uses various forms of found imagery—from online picture-sharing websites to photographs in books and mail-order catalogs-—and appropriates the pictures to construct large-scale installations. For RANGE, Umbrico focused on iconic images of mountains in various online and print media, such as Aperture’s Masters of Photography book series. She downloaded hundreds of camera apps for her iPhone, to rephotograph the mountains and process them through the multiple filters of the camera apps. Photo grain, dot-screen, pixel, and screen resolution collide to perform undulating moirés. The hallucinogenic colors of the camera-app filters blend with the disorienting effects of the iPhone’s gravity sensor to dislodge any perception of stability in the mountain, the master (most often gendered as male), or the photographic medium. 

Penelope Umbrico graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto and completed her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. She has received numerous awards and grants, including the John Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and the New York Foundation of the Arts fellowship. Umbrico has participated extensively in solo and group exhibitions worldwide, at venues such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg; Aperture Foundation, New York; Foto Museum, Antwerp, Belgium; Photographer’s Gallery, London; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her work is in the collections of numerous public institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), Chicago.