Filter Photo

[filterphoto]

We're excited to announce the exhibitors of our upcoming exhibition, "Power and Politics". Check out our website at www.filterphoto.com to view the complete list of artists. Image by @rsittler11 @filterphoto #powerandpolitics #chicagophoto #photogallery #filterphoto #politics (at Filter Photo)

[filterphoto]

Deinstalling "Bare Handed" by Holly Lynton. Stay tuned for our upcoming exhibition @aintbadmagazine Metropolis: Chicago #chicagophoto #photogallery #filterphoto #filterspace @erinhoytphotography @murray_je @golightly923 #hollylynton #barehanded #aintbadmagazine @carsonsanders @taylorcurry (at Filter Photo)

[filterphoto]

Some highlights from Holly Lynton's opening reception for her exhibition, "Bare Handed," at @filterphoto Photos by @golightly923 #hollylynton #chicagophoto #barehanded #filterphoto #filterspace #photogallery #chicagophoto #westloopart (at Filter Photo)

[filterphoto]

Today is he last day to see Holly Lynton's exhibition, "Bare Handed," at @filterphoto . Stop by Filter Space today and immerse yourself in her work- we will be open until 5 PM. @golightly923 #filterphoto #hollylynton #barehanded #filterspace #chicagophoto #photogallery #agriculture #farming #newengland (at Filter Photo)

[filterphoto]

Holly Lynton was just announced as a recipient of the Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship Grant. Her photographs will be on view at @filterphoto until the end of the week. Don't miss out on seeing her incredible work @golightly923 #filterphoto #filterspace #hollylynton #barehanded #chicagophoto #aaronsiskindfoundation #photogallery #agriculture #farming (at Filter Photo)

[filterphoto]

Early Bird Registration pricing for Portfolio Reviews and Workshops at the 2016 Festival ends tomorrow! If you'd like to lock in the best possible rates, please remember to register before June 20th. We are so excited about the programming for the 2016 Filter Photo Festival and want you to make the most of your time in Chicago. Join us for 4 days of celebrating photography through workshops, artist talks, portfolio reviews, and exhibitions.  Connect with friends and colleagues, expand your community and share your work.  The majority of events will take place at the Festival’s hotel headquarters, the Millennium Knickerbocker Hotel, and evening activities will primarily take place at galleries and partner institutions around the city.

[filterphoto]

Thanks to everyone who came out for the @filterphoto, @latitudechi, and @asmpmidwest mixer night 📸🍻 @erinhoytphotography @yuboworks @fotoford #filterphoto #latitudechicago #asmp #photogallery #chicagophoto (at Filter Photo)

[filterphoto]

If you haven't already, come by @filterphoto to check out Holly Lynton's amazing work from her series, "Bare Handed" 🐊@golightly923 #filterphoto #hollylynton #barehanded #alligator #agriculture #farming (at Filter Photo)

[filterphoto]

Registration for Filter Photo Festival 2016 is now open to the general public. We have an incredible line-up of programming, workshops, portfolio reviewers, and artist talks, including our renowned keynote speaker, Joel-Peter Witkin. Plan to attend the Festival and connect with artists, photographers, curators, and other photography professionals this fall.

Image: Joel-Peter Witkin, courtesy of Catherine Edelman Gallery

http://www.filterfestival.com/2016-pricing-and-registration/

[filterphoto]

Suzette Bross

www.suzettebross.com

Bio:

Suzette Bross is a photographer living and working in Chicago, Illinois. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, The National Gallery of Art, DC, Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Cleveland Museum of Art, The New Britain Museum of American Art, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, and more. 

With an MFA from the Institute of Design at IIT, Bross has taught at Columbia College Chicago, the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and the Northwestern University Medical School. Her work has been exhibited internationally and across the United States. Bross was commissioned by Northwestern Memorial Hospital to create a permanent portrait series of Chicago women and also included in the Cleveland Museums of Art’s “DIY: Photographers & Books” show. Recently, Bross exhibited her Walks series in a solo show at Geary Contemporary in New York City, NY and is currently working on her next project at the Chicago Artist Coalition’s Bolt Residency; her next solo show will be in June at Chicago Artists Coalition.

Statement:

Suzette Bross’ For the Glass transforms the flatbed scanner into a contemporary version of the photographic plate. Meditating on the tradition of portraiture, Bross mimics the sharp details and imperfections in the surfaces of 19th-century studio portraits. She uses digital equipment to return to this slow pace of production by scanning over her subjects as they sit for extended exposures. Bross’ portraits capture every movement to create a unique digital image that she cannot replicate. Her relationship with her subjects becomes a performative act of photographing. With the inclusion of Bross’ likeness in the series, her focus is on the intimacy of the work’s process and her investigations on how one is to interact with her reinvented plate. This suite of prints invites the viewer to become immersed in the surface of the image as it magnifies her relationship to the process and our uneasy relationship with technology.

[filterphoto]

Anne Emison Wishard

http://www.emisonimages.com/

Bio:

Indianapolis, Indiana photographer Anne Emison Wishard prefers to be out-of-doors and preferably with a camera in her hand. A master-gardener, she is inspired daily by the Jens Jensen landscape architecture outside her door and strives to capture its beauty.

 Anne has studied photography at the Indianapolis Art Center, Indiana University's Herron School of Art and the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops. Though she found that the six-month mentorship she did with Eddie Soloway, (whom she credits with having encouraged her to forget the photographic "rules" and to let her heart and lenses work together to create images) to have been the single best thing she did for her photographic education. 

Her images can be found in both public and private collections. She is currently teaching courses in macro photography at the Indianapolis Art Center and at her studio in the historic Stutz Business and Arts Center in downtown Indianapolis.

Statement:

I have long wanted to call myself a photographer…it was a dream I kept to myself as I worked, paid bills and as life progressed. Then, as these things do, something life -changing happened and it became clear that if I was going to live my dream it was time for me to get to it. Vacations became time spent at workshops, I began to seek out opportunities and subjects to shoot. In short, I began to do what I have always wanted. 

Today my work is expanding from straight prints to include photo encaustic - which I have become totally enraptured by – and other forms of non-traditional analog processes. I continue to travel to workshops and for opportunities to shoot new subjects or environments, but my work is usually of what is right in front of me on a daily basis – wherever I may be. 

When someone tries to pin a style or ethos on me, I usually respond “Abstract Realism.” Yes, that’s something I made up because I don’t want anyone else’s label to define what I’m doing. My work isn’t revolutionary. But it feeds my spirit and my life is much richer for the effort I have made to follow the path I should have started so long ago.

[filterphoto]

Join us for Members’ Night at @filterphoto tonight from 6-8 PM! Nate Larson will be giving an Artist Talk and signing his new book Geolocation: Tributes to the Data Stream to coincide with the current exhibition at Filter Space. We’ll raffle off a bundle of books from past Filter artists and enjoy a selection of beer courtesy of Half Acre Beer Company. We have a fun night planned to support our current Members and encourage new Membership – bring a friend! #filterphoto #filterfestival #natelarson @larsnateson @mmarnimcfly #photogallery #membersnight #chicagophoto (at Filter Photo)

[filterphoto]

Geolocation: Tributes to the Data Stream An Interview with Nate Larson 

http://www.larson-shindelman.com/ 
FP: Hello Nate and Marni! We are so thrilled to be exhibiting your series, Geolocation: Tributes to the Data Stream, at Filter Space. Can you please discuss how you came about pursuing this project?

NL: Hi Rachel, Nate here, representing Larson Shindelman. Marni is traveling with students right now, so I’ll take point on this conversation.

We are interested in all the different ways people put information out into the world. The project started seven years ago when Twitter had about 5 million Tweets a day and now we are up to something on the order of 550 million per day. There is a lot of digital information floating out there, and we are interested in preserving a small fragment of it and reattaching it to the location from whence it came.

The first one we shot was in May 2009 in downtown Chicago just as the financial crisis was getting really bad. At that moment, this particular Tweet was by someone who had apparently lost their job at an investment bank. When we stood on the site of the tweet, it really connected with us and made it clear what it is to be a part of that tragedy or event. We were also thinking a lot about how people were relating to each other in this way. Rather than going to a bar and crying it out with close friends, he is posting it on Twitter where anybody could access this information. This points to a big shift about how people relate to each other in this day and age.

We think that social media has changed the way that we relate to each other and it is amazing to be able to maintain a low level of contact with a vast array of people from all stages of our lives. The NY Times Magazine writer Clive Thompson calls this “ambient awareness,” suggesting that we have a technological sixth sense to know the minds of other people. If I see you on the street and you just posted about winning a major writing award on your Twitter feed, we can jump a step in the conversation and focus on the latest news without getting lost in the small talk.

On the other hand, there is a lot of sociological studies and journalism that suggests that even though we are more connected than ever, higher feelings of loneliness are reported. The first tweet that we shot for the project was a wry commentary on losing a job. It is astonishing to think about people putting that information out there in a public way, rather than limiting it to a few close friends. We also put more personal information out there than ever before and we have serious privacy concerns - who is using that data and for what purpose? Corporations mine it to market to us and there are a number of crime reports with criminals determining your locations through social media. The potential is boundless but we are also mindful of how this information persists on the Internet and the unintended consequences.

We think of it as an “expanded documentary,” which has been floating around as a term for a few years in photo/art circles. The objective of this project is to listen to whispers on social media and link them to places in the physical communities that originated them. There is a digital noise surrounding us, invisible chatter, and we spend time listening to this in each city we travel through. These photographs serve as a means of memorializing these brief virtual moments.

FP: How did this project transform into a collaborative effort? Can you speak about how your respective creative practices influenced this body of work?

NL: We’ve been working together for nine years and have made a lot of work together. This particular project has been a large part of our practice, but the practice really emerges out of a bigger conversation about technology in culture and how we use it to relate to one another.

In Marni’s practice, before we were working together, she was collecting and responding to Internet urban legends. I was making work about religious miracles and sourcing a lot of them from message boards and other online forums. Our collaborative practice naturally extends the relationships from our previous work on digital culture.

FP: I feel like Twitter is so minimal- far less content driven than other social media platforms. Why do you think people feel so driven to reach out with such a cryptic form of communication?

NL: It’s funny, speaking as Nate, I don’t like Twitter much. I find the threading difficult and alienating. Speaking for Marni, she uses it primarily to scan news headlines and articles, rather than as a social community. So we’re deeply immersed when we’re making work, but rather limited in our personal uses of it outside of that.

It’s hard to generalize why people use it, but I think that it’s public facing by default has a lot to do with it. The idea of building an audience is an enticing one, and I think that a lot of folks start there, and then the modes of engagement shift depending how they interact with it and the feedback that they get from other users. I imagine that it’s a relationship that evolves, like anything else.

We see the same patterns in each city. There are a large majority of tweets about love and relationships, then a subset of those about loneliness. There are tweets about jobs, work and some about overall economic conditions. Each city has some specific to certain political climates or local culture, and we research those contextual elements when we come across them.

FP: How did the disparate nature between the text and photographs encourage you to consider your own relationships with social media?

NL: A big part of the project has to do with ideas of privacy, and we think a lot about how people just tend to set their privacy settings and not adjust as they go. They might turn on their location feature and forget that their phone is tracking them everywhere they go.

People leave a trail of digital breadcrumbs behind them whether they intended to or not. The questions we are engaging with are whether or not we are aware of what information we are putting out there—making public—where it is broadcast, and so on. We have looked at a number of cases where people have been burglarized based upon information they had put out on a social network. We have also looked at various scare stories about people who have looked at photographs of children inappropriately and then tracked the movements of those children.

In none of our work are we hacking anyone. This information is publicly available, and so we are able to make these photographs to make people aware of what they are doing and to make them think about their own habits. At the same time, these technologies are changing the way we relate to each other, and hopefully it might lead to richer and deeper relationships.

Our work has made us deeply self-conscious about our own Internet behaviors and uses.

FP: Your series, Geolocation, has also been published by Flash Powder Projects. How do the framed prints and monograph engage the work in different ways?

NL: We’re thrilled about the publication of the book and we love that the work can exist in more than one form in the world and be accessed differently by audiences. We hope that each form allows for a deeper engagement and contemplation. We also love that the book collects 78 photographs, as the project for us really gets richer with quantity.

FP: You both have also been working on a separate series, Death of the Gold Standard. How do you see this body of work as a progression from Geolocation?

NL: Death of the Gold Standard came out of a bigger conversation that we’re having about data, the value of data, and how that data is applied in the world. This new series became a way to play with data in a different way and to investigate the role that it plays in society.

On August 15, 1971, President Nixon announced that the United States would no longer officially trade dollars for gold. Although the US had abandoned the gold standard in the early twentieth century, this announcement completely severed the relationship between the dollar and the gold market thus creating the environment for the credit crisis of our current times.

The Economist introduced the Big Mac Index in 1986 as a comparison device for currency across cultures. In our global culture, the price of a standardized item can be used to illuminate multiple economic conditions: labor, trade, trends, and economic health. Death of the Gold Standard investigates various indices, by asking, How can we make value tangible? We strive to understand equivalence through everyday data points and alternative metrics.

FP: Do you plan to work together again in the future? Are there any new projects on the horizon?

NL: Our practice is ongoing. We’re currently gearing up for a residency with CEC Artslink in St. Petersburg, Russia, where we’ll make a set of Geolocation photographs, make an interactive GPS Portrait (with the Geek Picnic festival), and also enjoy some shared studio time to test some new ideas.

In the US, we’ve started a series of “e-commerce safety zones,” where folks meet in person to complete online transactions. This new series of photographs, Safe Trade, is a record of the places that virtual commerce meets physical commerce in this very peculiar way. We are investigating these safe trade zones, the physical sites linked to the virtual, and the stories of the people who are both using and manning the surveillance of these spaces. Some of the photographs are in a “soft release” on our website.

We’re also working on a set of photographs based on the Ashley Madison website hack, which was a website for folks looking to connect outside their marriages. Hackers dumped all of the data online, which we’ve downloaded, and are currently looking at small towns with a high number of users. The work will be less about the individual users and more about the towns themselves and imagined small town affairs.


“Geolocation: Tributes to the Data Stream” will be on view at Filter Space until May 28th at 1821 W. Hubbard Street, Suite 207, Chicago, IL 60622

[filterphoto]

We are absolutely thrilled to announce that Joel-Peter Witkin will be Filter Festival's keynote lecture on Thursday, September 22nd, the first night of the Festival, thanks to Headline Sponsor Columbia College Chicago Photography Department. We look forward to seeing you this fall at the eighth annual Filter Photo Festival! @filterphoto #joel-peterwitkin #filterphoto #filterfestival @columphoto @edelmangallery

[filterphoto]

Hyounsang Yoo

www.hyounsangyoo.com 

Bio:

Hyounsang Yoo explores relationships between history and the production of idealized realities using photography, video, installation, and sculpture. Yoo references image production and memory as a strategy to recontextualize cultural histories, globalized mass media messaging, and outline socio-political landscapes of consumer markets. Yoo has exhibited in the New York Bridge Art Fair, EXPO Chicago, Netherlands Drents Museum Assen, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, among others. He has received several awards including the Snider Prize Museum of Contemporary Photography, International Photography Awards, PhotoSpiva, and Korea’s Selected Artists Belt. Yoo received his BFA and MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute Chicago, where he is an instructor in the Contemporary Practice and Photography departments.

Statement:

My works explores relationships between history and ideas of production of reality thorough image making process. This body of work uses multiple references to global history of photography production and memory as one of strategies of re-enactment to interrogate the relevance of the past in relationship to the present. My practice is informed and shaped by transition. I look to mass media as a starting point because it provides an outline of the sociopolitical landscape. I take the source, which is often a specific political and historical event. I then strip it from its context, leaving only the relationships between people, in individuality and as a group, and the event. I then manipulate and translate this information; with it I compile, reinterpret, and categorize the elements within the original image. Even though the final product is often heavily manipulated, staged, and stripped of contextual information, the generated images are still capable of portraying the political and historical context. I am thus exploring how the individual or group that produces mass media is imprinting some contextual memory on the images associated with these political and historical events. Specifically, each of these individuals or groups is a function of the political and historical context within which they live. Consequently, they are unable to produce an unbiased image, thus even when manipulated, my final images are still capable of triggering the memory of the viewers. However, because historical and political context is heterogeneous in space and time, each memory response is a function of where the viewer is from and what event is being portrayed. This work thus allows me to question how political and social differences in a globalized world shape our individual memory response.

For example, “Ribbon Cutting” (2013) is reenacted from when the Sungsu-Bridge collapsed in South Korea in 1994 due to improper welding of the steel trusses of the suspension structure. They rebuilt the bridge in 1997, where they had a ribbon ceremony. Ribbon cutting ceremonies are public ceremonies conducted to inaugurate the opening to the general public, whether it is a new building or business. I am curious as to what is left in the photographs, once the historical context is stripped away. 

Also, Recent In C, LC, VM, VLM, Y, LK, LLK, PK and MK (2014), captures a moment without mediation. This work turns the digital formula of representation into physical objects. An image photographically created on an extremely frigid mid-western night, This large-scale construction brings the practice of studio photography out into the landscape. Uncontrollable elements like temperature and wind were of critical importance in taming the simultaneous release of smoke. reflection on process — each cloudlike pillar mimics the individual colors found in contemporary digital photographic printers including the Epson Stylus Pro 11880 that was used to produce the print. 

I aim to create bodies of work in conversation with the question of the experience of time and visibility throughout events. My work looks to Virilio’s Dromology and Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. As Virilio states “the more speed increases, the faster freedom decreases”, while Baudrillard contends that the Simulacra depicts things that either had no reality to begin with, or that no longer have any original meaning. I investigate both fronts by questioning the Simulacra of the process of image making. In particular, I attempt to understand what it means to move forward in relation to time. My analysis is mediated by an understanding that the future does not evolve in isolation but rather is a function of what has happened in the past. This begs the question of what is progress? Is it creating distance between the past and the present or is it a future that encompasses the greatest amount of information from the past? In these works, I continue to discover the complexity of moments that can be instantaneously swift, slow, fast, loud, quiet, visible, invisible, stable to unstable, and explore the possibility of an image-making process that can contain this complexity.

[filterphoto]

Virgil DiBiase

http://vdibiase.zenfolio.com/ Bio:

I am a photographer and neurologist living in rural northwest Indiana.  Like most photographers in my generation I am self taught and grew up with black and white film and the wet darkroom. For many years I have roamed the streets and country roads of rural Indiana making portraits of people I encounter. 

Statement:

This series is from the nearby county fairs.  County fairs have been a long running tradition in rural America, and for many communities they represent the highlight of the summer.  Pure Americana.  This series is called Corn Dogs, Candy Apples and Funnel Cakes and some of these images were published in the sold out zine of the same name.  I never tire of walking and wandering with my camera.

[filterphoto]

Larry Chait

http://www.larrychait.com/

Bio:

Larry Chait was born in Des Moines and grew up in the Midwest (Iowa and Kansas). He showed an interest in art at an early age, drawing, painting and making constructions of all sorts. Despite his interest in the arts, he decided to pursue a career as a research scientist, and received a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Texas in Austin and a Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the Medical College of Virginia. Throughout college and graduate school, he continued to draw and paint in his spare time. During a postdoctoral position in Little Rock, Arkansas, his interest in photography took root, largely because his laboratory had its own darkroom. In 1982 Larry moved to Chicago, to take a position at the University of Chicago, where he did research until 1993, when he left academia to tutor children on the south side of Chicago. With the emergence of digital photography in the late ‘90’s, Larry’s interest in photography was renewed, and since 2002 he has devoted himself full-time to developing his photographic vision. In 2003 he earned a Certificate in Digital Photography from Columbia College Chicago. He has shown his photo-based work throughout the U.S. in more than 65 juried group and 9 solo exhibitions. His work is included in numerous public and private collections. Larry currently lives in the West Town neighborhood of Chicago with his patient and very supportive wife, Charmane Eastman.

Statement:

Noir

This series of photo-based work represents a synthesis of my love of film noir and of Georges Seurat's black conté crayon drawings, done by him in the mid-1880's. Seurat's drawings are blurry, dark, and mysterious and very photographic in the sense that they contain almost no visible contour lines; shapes are defined entirely by changes in tone. I created my series from images that I appropriated from old photos, TV shows, and movies; and photos by and of myself. I made myself the protagonist in many of the images. I sometimes donned disguises to thwart and confuse my many enemies. I developed a procedure in Photoshop to mimic the look of Seurat's drawings, down to the type of textured, laid paper that he used. As a final homage, I drew on the prints with black conté crayon.