Penelope Umbrico
About
Penelope Umbrico’s multimedia works utilize search engines and web platforms as an expansive archive to explore the production and consumption of images and objects. Engaging consumer software applications and the physical apparatuses of technology, her work considers our mediated experience of the world through the lens and the screen. Umbrico’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is represented in museum collections around the world. She is the recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Fellowship. Her monographs have been published by Aperture NYC and RVB Books Paris.
Gallery
LACP Interviews Penelope Umbrico
LACP asks Penelope Umbrico ten questions about their background, career in and beliefs about photography.
Los Angeles Center of Photography: What kind of photographer are you?
Penelope Umbrico: My studio practice is photo-based, that is: I am an artist who uses photography, and whose subject is photography. I work with various archives (print and web), I collect images and aggregate them into new forms that point to something other than their original intended meaning.
LACP: How long have you been shooting?
PU: I rarely actually “shoot”, though I have some a few projects, but I have been making work with images for as long as I can remember.
LACP: Where did you get your training?
PU: Undergraduate at Ontario College of Art in Toronto Canada, where I grew up; MFA in Fine Art at School of Visual Arts, NYC, where I live and teach now at SVA, MFA Photo.
LACP: When did you know you wanted to devote your life to photography?
PU: I’m not sure I’m devoted to photography. I love photograph and all it’s fluid complexity, but I generally use whatever medium best suits an idea I am working through, and the subjects around photography have been the best suited for most of my work since graduate school when I switched from painting to photography.
LACP: Did you ever come close to giving up?
PU: No. Of course there’s tough times and outside factors one can’t control, but I’ve always had the need to make stuff despite those things… in fact probably because of those things: being in the studio is either a way to grapple with things, or an escape from them.
LACP: Have you sacrificed anything by being an artist?
PU: I’m not sure I would use the word sacrifice… but I love what I do and I do it despite it being impractical most of the time because I find meaning in it. Maybe doing anything that has meaning to you requires some sort of sacrifice.
LACP: What have you gained by being a artist?
PU: The capacity to be obsessively analytical.
LACP: What classes do you teach at LACP?
PU: Reservoir
LACP: What do you love most about teaching?
PU: The dialogue, and learning from it.
LACP: What advice would you give someone who is thinking about making a career in photography?
PU: This is advice I would give anyone about making a career in any creative field: Go for it 100% if you can’t imagine doing anything else. If you can imagine doing anything else, do that… otherwise you will resent those sacrifices you will likely have to make.