The medium is the message,” wrote Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian prophet of the electronic age, in an oft-quoted aphorism encapsulating how the technology used to transmit ideas shapes the very act of thinking. Nearly 50 years later, Penelope Umbrico is discerning patterns amid the visual communication that inundates and alters our existence, digesting common motifs in photographic composites that expose universal obsessions and illuminate motivations driving our behavior.
Umbrico honed this process of accumulating and reframing found images in the 2000s as she scoured home décor catalogs for recurring details, extracting props such as garments discarded and books opened to stage an illusory casual intimacy in uninhabited rooms. “I was interested in the spaces we made for ourselves to look at, and how desire gets constructed around that,” the Toronto-raised artist recently explained in her Brooklyn studio.
When Umbrico identified sunsets as the most frequent subject on Flickr, the photo-sharing website, in 2005, she mined online photos by amateur photographers and created Suns from Sunsets by cropping the suns out of selected snapshots and arranging them in grids that can stretch on for yards.
“When you see the aggregate, there’s an element of total anxiety around that sense of individuality and uniqueness that we all have. That anxiety is maybe what makes people want to stand in front of a sunset and say, ‘I am here. I am really here right now,’” Umbrico muses. Audiences pose for selfies in front of her solar multiplication tables and post them on social media, which Umbrico has included in her exhibit, bringing the project full circle. Shallow Sun, her exhibition at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum through Oct. 25, includes an installation that occupies the museum’s built-in camera obscura, a dark room pierced by a single small opening that reflects the scene outside onto an interior wall, a phenomenon discovered in ancient Greece. The optical precursor of photography helped Renaissance painters depict perspective and has enabled astronomers since the 13th century to study the sun. Pinhole cameras are still used to safely observe the solar eclipses that Umbrico is exploring on-site.
“If it’s the first exploration of light that creates an image, what does it mean now in terms of how we experience light?”To illustrate a premise that electronic screens are assuming the sun’s role, Umbrico is sealing off the camera obscura by suspending a monitor outside its lens that plays a video looping stills she shot with a smartphone of Suns from Sunsets as they filled her computer screen. This pixelated orb is projected onto the wall inside, replacing its natural view of the Aldrich grounds in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
Click here to read more about Umbrico’s exhibit.
