Expand and Contract: Photography and Mixed Media (Virtual Exhibition)

The Juror

Rotem Rozental, Ph.D, is the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Center of Photography. Between 2016-2022, she served as Chief Curator at American Jewish University, where she was also Assistant Dean of the Whizin Center for Continuing Education and Senior Director of Arts and Creative Programming. Her upcoming book, Pre-State Photographic Archives and the Zionist Movement will be released by Routledge Publishers in March 2023, and was named recipient of the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Award by the Association for Jewish Studies.

Rotem is a lecturer at USC Roski School of Art and Design Critical Studies Department. She mentors artists worldwide and contributes regularly to magazines, journals and exhibition catalogues. Her writings about contemporary art and image-based media, as well as Jewish and Israeli art, were published in Artforum.com, Photographies, Jewish Currents, Tablet and Forward, among other outlets.

Juror Statement

External conditions – climate, light, heat, cold, location – may change materials into something new and unexpected. Expand and Contract thinks about photographic practice in similar terms, exploring how the melding (or separation) of various materials and perspectives may shift our sensorial experience.

The artists participating in this exhibition differ from one another greatly in terms of their approach toward visual storytelling. What they share, however, is a deep interest in photographic processes, in stretching, expanding and redefining the possibilities of vision, communication, presence and aesthetics. This exhibition seeks to address the importance of such experimentations for contemporary work, while highlighting its deep connections with the lineage and histories of photographic practice. At a moment where technological innovations are again upending the way we think about photographic production, this exhibition seeks to remind such apprehensions have long histories and genealogies.

These works begin in domestic spaces, in experimental moments in the dark room, in wild imaginations, the great outdoors, personal memories or family troves. Whether the participating artists revisit traditional processes and bring them to digital existence, or if they position two-dimensional images as sculptural objects, whether they re-configure printing or find new ways to reflect concerns about environmental justice, these artists immerse in the materiality of the photographic image and its ever-expanding meeting points with other disciplines, discourses, ideas and styles.