PHOTOGRAPHY NOW 2020
November 14, 2020 – January 31, 2021 (extended)
Each year, CPW invites a curator of national or international repute to apply their unique curatorial vision in creating a survey exhibition of contemporary photography. Seen over time, Photography Now exhibitions create a timeline that depicts photography as the living, ever evolving-art form it is. This year’s installment of CPW’s Photography Now exhibition presents 10 artists of a wide range of styles and backgrounds. Listen to their soundbites to find out more about these compelling artists.
About the Juror
Andy Adams is a culture producer and digital director with a passion for visual media and creative communications. Since 2004, he has consulted arts organizations and cultural institutions that use the internet to engage, inspire, and educate the public.
Adams is a pioneer in the field of online art exhibitions and has collaborated with the RISD Museum of Art, the Australian Centre for Photography, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and numerous other organizations. He is the director of FlakPhoto Projects, a web-based digital/arts lab focused on promoting photography in all of its forms.
In his spare time, he hosts the FlakPhoto Network, a 16,000-member online community focused on conversations about visual/media culture. Find him on Instagram @FlakPhoto.
About the Artists
William Camargo’s practice addresses issues of gentrification, Chicanx/Latinx histories and the systemic erasure of Brown people through the use of counter-narratives that amplify and extirpate hegemonic structures in local city narratives. Camargo negotiates the legacies and disempowerment of Brown people in his hometown of Anaheim, California through photography, installation, political public performances, community archiving and as an arts-based educator. He responds to found archives of the city through a historical art praxis that manifests as series-based artworks that address geographic places. By working with historically underrepresented narratives, Camargo deals with the effects of systematic erasure and implementing a critical pedagogical approach with room for further investigation into forgotten stories. Camargo confronts and challenges social constructs that are placed upon a city with historically racist policies and ideologies. Through these liberatory actions, he provokes new interpretations and elevates hidden histories to the forefront. These issues of erasure, structural racism, and displacement become emblematic to other places and histories with similar power structures.
Anastasia Davis‘ body of work is the culmination of Davis’ fascination with the changes in perception and perspective that often are associated with mental illness. Creating these works during a period of relative personal calm with interspersed depressive episodes, Davis photographed her surroundings with special attention to the emotional layers evoked in each image. The curve of a branch, the slant of a light against the wall, the yellow sky – each bringing her into a space adjacent to the present. A place where threat, safety, anxiety and calm all coexist. These photographs capture this in-between-state and its ambiguity as well as contradiction, both in times of clarity and in times of darkness.
Matt Eich‘s long-form photographic essay ‘Say Hello to Everybody, OK?’ attempts to condense the chaos of America into a controlled context as a historical document and a statement of personal concern. Including images from 2014 to present day, Eich examines the time leading up to and now during Donald Trump’s presidency. Eich utilizes photography to explore the complicated landscape of America, a diverse place that often struggles to define itself. Often finding himself caught up in the threads between memory, family, community and the American condition, he uses this medium to counteract personal and national tendencies toward amnesia. This Amnesia allows us to continue to inflict great damage upon ourselves and one another, each being complicit.
Kristen Joy Emack’s project, Cousins, documents her daughter and niece’s involvement in each other’s lives while growing up. Having each other to navigate this tender process, Emack captures their innocence and confident relationships to themselves, their world and one another. Between them is an intimate and spiritual knowledge that is both ordinary and extraordinary. As they have matured, both have begun to understand that the lives of Black girls are not well documented and intend for the series to bring forward this perspective. Emack hopes that by capturing these moments, they will see the beauty of childhood together and when they look for everyday representations of themselves in the world, they will find themselves in the work that they have made together, reflected with love.
In 2017, Adam J. Long made a conscious decision to reconcile his confusion, aggravation and anger through his photographs. These visceral and immediate works have culminated in the series, Urgency. Long explores the city at night, using it as a central metaphor that links the rough grit of the city and the abrasive climate that the United States floats within. At a time where polarizing events produce paradoxical reactions, Long creates a visual reminder and reflection of this tumultuous time under an administration that provokes this divide.
Natasha Moustache photographs communities in Bonzeville’s Dearborn Homes and Parkway Gardens of Greater South Crossing, two of the last remaining housing projects in Chicago’s South Side. Moustache’s work is centered on Black communities with an emphasis on Black women in an effort to create appropriate representation and to destigmatize the lives of those photographed. Each image seeks to engage the human community in a conversation with itself that transcends difference and emphasizes commonality. Moustache’s work individualizes the human experience of those who exist within the walls of a physical structure that was built to oppress and is upheld by an unseen but deeply felt institutionalized oppression. By underlining our similarities and underscoring our shared citizenship, the images bring a necessary conversation to the forefront.
Jerry Takigawa explores the racism perpetrated on his ancestors during WWII through his series, Balancing Cultures. This xenophobia resulted in their incarceration into concentration camps sanctioned by Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066. A recent discovery of Takigawa’s family photos taken in the camps compelled him to share the untold story of his family’s loss and suffering. Taken in Jerome, Arkansas, these photographs were explicit evidence of previously anecdotal camp references. They offered Takigawa what photography often excels at – visual veracity. Piecing together a historical puzzle of photographs, memories and artifacts, Takigawa expressed the tragedy of his family’s experience.
Jade Thirawas‘ ongoing project Young Cash Karen is about a close-knit community of young refugees from Burma, or Myanmar, who have resettled in Rochester, NY. They are Karen, pronounced kuh-ren, a Burmese ethnic minority that has fought a decades-long and still ongoing civil war against the Burmese government over their native lands. For most or all of their lives, the young men of ”Young Cash Karen” lived in remote refugee camps across the Burmese border in Thailand until taking the leap to resettle in the United States, some alone or with others. ”Young Cash Karen” is the self- chosen name of the brotherhood they have formed together. They proudly use the name to express a sense of belonging and solidarity.
Aaron Turner uses photography as a transformative process to understand place. Turner uses the technique of photographing in intervals, returning to the same circumstances, scenarios and people over and over again. With this practice, the work becomes more about time. The subject never changes, but instead, the photograph explores the passage of time. Within this act, photography can become an illusion of instantaneous fragments which creates the chance for a reunion of relationship, kinship and growth.
Zhidong Zhang’s practice is situated within the ongoing questions about identity construction, representation and the role of imagery in contemporary culture. This series, Natural Impersonation, tampers with the construction of sexual identity in relation to the unyielding repression of sexuality in China. Incorporating found objects with portraits of family and friends, Zhang constructs scenes of desire, humor, trauma, fetish and violence through the exploration of sentimentality, Asian bodies, and cultural language, which are deeply rooted in the specificity of his experience as a closeted gay man. As a way of reexamining queer invisibility and claiming queer agency in a heteronormative and patriarchal society, he allows perverse moments to coalesce into gender performances that infiltrate and destabilize rigid and stereotypical codes of gender, sexuality, identification, and normality in Asian culture. Within this context, the chasm between rhetoric and reality configures a manufactured world where the patriarchal and phallocentric nature of society is dismantled, and where queer identities are embraced and celebrated without struggling to masquerade for the fear of societal and cultural consequences.