Focal Point – Details, episodes & analysis

In this episode, artists Meghann Riepenhoff and Penelope Umbrico chat with MoCP curator, Kristin Taylor. The two artists discuss their backgrounds and shared interests in experimenting and pushing the indexical qualities of photography, as well as the work of Alison Rossiter and Joanne Leonard.

Meghann Riepenhoff is most well-known for her largescale cyanotype prints that she creates by collaborating with ocean waves, rain, ice, snow, and coastal shores. She places sheets of light-sensitized paper in these water elements, allowing nature to act as the composer of what we eventually see on the paper. As the wind driven waves crash or the ice melts, dripping across the surface of the coated paper, bits of earth sediment like sand and gravel also become inscribed on the surface. The sun is the final collaborator, with its UV rays developing the prints and reacting with the light sensitizing chemical on the paper to draw out the Prussian blue color. These camera-less works harness the light capturing properties of photographic processes, to translate, in her words, “the landscape, the sublime, time, and impermanence.” 

Rieppenhoff’s work has been featured in exhibitions at the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Denver Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, among many others. Her work is held in the collections of the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Harvard Art Museum, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She has published two monographs: Littoral Drift + Ecotone and Ice with Radius Books and Yossi Milo Gallery. She was an artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts and the John Michael Kohler Center for the Arts, was an Affiliate at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and was a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow.

Penelope Umbrico examines the sheer volume and ubiquity of images in contemporary culture. She uses various forms of found imagery—from online picture sharing websites to photographs in books and mail order catalogs—and appropriates the pictures to construct large-scale installations. She states: "I take the sheer quantity of images online as a collective archive that represents us—a constantly changing auto-portrait." In the MoCP permanent collection is a piece titled 8,146,774 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 9/10/10. It is an assemblage of numerous pictures that she found on the then widely used image-sharing website, Flickr, by searching for one of its most popular search terms: sunset. She then cropped the found files and created her own 4x6 inch prints on a Kodak Easy Share printer. She clusters the prints into an enormous array to underscore the universal human attraction to capture the sun’s essence. The title references the number of results she received from the search on the day she made the work: the first version of the piece created in 2007 produced 2,303,057 images while this version from only three years later in 2010 produced 8,146,774 images. 

Umbrico’s work has been featured in exhibitions around the world, including MoMA PS1, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; MassMoCA, MA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; The Photographers’ Gallery, London; Daegu Photography Biennale, Korea; 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. She is joining us today from her studio in Brooklyn, NY.

This episode features Jay Wolke and Eli Giclas in conversation with MoCP Curator of Academic Programs and Collections, Kristin Taylor. Jay and Eli discuss their photographic approaches to depict the built environment as a reflection of patterns of human consumption and an imbalanced relationship with nature. They also discuss their appreciation of works by Stan Douglas and Dawn Kim in the MoCP permanent collection.

Jay Wolke is an artist and educator based in Chicago, who is known for his decades-long practice of photographing people and architectural spaces. His work often explores the disparities between human ambition and its manifestation in the built environment. Through images made along highways, high rises, underpasses, over passes, rock quarries, casinos,  parks, and more, he shows, in his words “perpetual re-imaginings, capricious assemblies, ominous entanglements, and repeatedly regrettable consequences of human industry and hubris.”

He has several monographs, including Along the Divide: Photographs of the Dan Ryan Expressway, 2004; and Same Dream Another Time, 2017. His works have been exhibited internationally and are in the permanent print collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York MOMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and San Francisco MOMA, the MoCP, among others. He is currently a Professor of Photography at Columbia College Chicago, where he was Chair of the Art and Design Department from 2000-2005 and again from 2008-2013.

Eli Giclas is a Chicago-based photographer and designer whose projects in rich blacks, whites, and greys speak to an in-between-ness of action for the climate, and the consequences from broken relationships to nature. In his project Counting After Lightning (2021-2024), he makes large-scale images of industrial sites in the Midwest, representing patterns of consumption driven by extractive industries that we use for power. In contrast, another series, On Wing, 2022-2023, he shows volunteers and locations within an urban bird sanctuary, offering one story as a symbol of larger collective acts in healing. He states: “I consider our relationship to our planet and what must change to make a better, more thoughtful future possible…underscoring their collective reverence and the significance of their efforts.” Eli recently completed his MFA in Photography at Columbia College Chicago, under the instruction of Jay Wolke, and he also completed his BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Arizona in 2018.

Steph Foster and Steven Tourlentes discuss their projects in photography and film that shed light on some of the many stories and systems surrounding mass incarceration in the United States that are largely concealed from public view. Additionally, Steph and Steven discuss works in the MoCP’s permanent collection by Kris Graves and Zora J Murff.

In this episode, MoCP Curatorial Fellow, Asha Iman Veal, is in conversation with artist Işıl Eğrikavuk and artist duo Cognate Collective (Amy Sanchez-Arteaga and Misael Diaz). Together they discuss their thoughts on nationality, identity, creative influences and their works included the MoCP exhibition, Beautiful Diaspora: You Are Not The Lesser Part. The artists also share their thoughts on other works in the museum’s collection by Laia Abril, Doretha Lange and David Taylor.

To help stop the spread of Covid-19, this episode was recorded over Zoom and not in the WCRX studios.

MoCP Curator, Kristin Taylor, is in conversation with artists Laia Abril and Elinor Carucci. They discuss depictions of the female body and their works in the MoCP exhibition, Reproductive: Health, Fertility, Agency.

In this episode, Chicago-based photographer Kelli Connell is in conversation with her long-term model and muse, Kiba Jacobson, along with Museum of Contemporary Photography’s curator of academic programs and collections, Kristin Taylor. Connell and Jacobson discuss topics of portraiture, relationships, and the performance of gender and identity within Connell’s series, Double Life (2002-ongoing). Additionally, they discuss works in the MoCP’s collection by Peter Cochrane, Zackary Drucker, and Rhys Ernst.

In this episode, mixed media artist Joanne Leonard and photographer Melissa Pinney are in conversation with MoCP’s curator of academic programs and collections, Kristin Taylor. Leonard and Pinney discuss works in the MoCP’s permanent collection by Elinor Carucci and Ruth Thorne-Thomsen as well as their thoughts on photographing the lives of their daughters, feminism, and how they navigate depicting both personal and political subjects.