Solar Eclipses
Penelope Umbrico
RVB Books
English
Softcover
Second Edition of 100
100 pages
220 x 280 mm
2016
ISBN 9791090306578
Penelope Umbrico’s project Solar Eclipses is made up of a collection of collages created using images of solar eclipses found in the New York Public Library Picture Collection. She creates these collages by placing the images on a scanner and arranging them to get as many as possible into each copy. This book is a collection of photocopies of those original images created on the library scanner. Umbrico’s approach to the project mediates on the duality between physical experience and the digitising of images printed on paper. The process of searching through the library’s collection today seems absurd in light of the facility and accessibility brought by the digital internet age, thus as the collection is gradually digitised, the material form of paper – a reflective medium requiring an external light source to be seen, and that often represents light in the image it supports – is now seen depicted online via the medium of the screen. Reflective paper becomes projective light. Umbrico chooses to focus on the solar eclipse at the library as the epitome of this relationship between the reflective and projective. The dynamic of the eclipse is the negation of natural light with that whose visibility is dependent on it. Thus her process reflects the same fascination with the photocopier itself as an “eclipser”: its light escapes around the paper it scans, creating the densest black – an inverted eclipse. White becomes light, and light becomes black.
(source: https://www.thelibraryproject.ie/products/solar-eclipses-penelope-umbrico)
About the Artist
Penelope Umbrico’s installations, video, and digital media works utilize photo-sharing and consumer-to-consumer websites as an expansive archive to explore the production and consumption of images. Her work navigates between producer and consumer, local and global, the individual and the collective, with attention to the technologies that are produced by (and produce) these forces. Umbrico’s work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; MassMoCA, MA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; Art Museum Gosta, Finland; Foto Colectania, Barcelona, Spain; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; Daegu Photography Biennale, Korea; Pingyao International Photography Festival, China; Kunstverein Ludwigshafen, Germany; Rencontres d’Arles, France; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Australia; among many others, and is represented in museum collections around the world. She has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship; Sharpe-Walentas Studio Grant; Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship; New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship; Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Her monographs have been published by Aperture NYC and RVB Books Paris.
http://www.penelopeumbrico.net/
(source: http://www.penelopeumbrico.net/index.php/info/bio–cv/)
About the Publisher
RVB Books is both an independent publisher dedicated to designing and printing unique fine arts books and a gallery featuring exhibitions on new editorial practices.
https://rvb-books.com/
(source: https://rvb-books.com/pages/infos)
