Aperture Spring Party
April 17
Featuring unique works by Penelope Umbrico

Aperture Foundation held a Spring Fundraiser — the first annual, they said (though later it was determined that Spring Fundraisers may have occurred in the past). Anyway, this one was centered around a Penelope Umbrico project called Moving Mountains, which, is likely best explained in her words:

Mountains, Moving, 2012 – ongoing, considers an analog history of photography within the digital torrent that is its current technological manifestation. I steady my focus on the mountain: oldest subject, stable object, singular, immovable landmark, site of orientation, place of spiritual contemplation. I employ smartphone camera apps to make new photographs of the images of mountains that appear in canonical master photographs. I find them everywhere: in books, magazines, advertisements, online. Pointing my iPhone down at these mountains, the hallucinogenic colors of the camera app filters blend with the disorienting effects of the iPhone’s gravity sensor. Photo grain, dot-screen, pixel, and screen resolution collide, often performing undulating moirés. My mountains are unstable, mobile, have no gravity, change with each iteration, remastered. Here is the biggest distance, the longest range. I present a dialogue between distance and proximity, limited and unlimited, the singular and the multiple, the fixed and the moving, the master and the copy. I propose an inverse correlation between the number of photographs that exist of mountains at any one time, and the stability of photography at that time.

What she didn’t say was that there were 350 pieces in this project (and we printed ALL of them for a one-night event!). It was easy though … Penelope is super-together and terrific to work with.

That’s a mere 84 out of 350 Moving Mountains right there …

As usual, it was a booming fun party with lots of people and food and music … and an open bar that didn’t seem to disappoint anyone involved.

 
Purple, the color of Spring 2015

Tags: Aperture Foundation, Archival Pigment Printing (Inkjet), Penelope Umbrico