Luther Price is known for his work with Super-8 and 16mm film, particularly for constructing films out of discarded prints of documentaries, snippets of Hollywood features, and other fragments of cinema. He frequently physically manipulates this found footage by scratching, distressing, and painting the film surface, or even by burying it in the earth so that natural processes such as rotting and mold growth begin to change the film. In recent years, Price has begun to experiment with handmade slides. Again, he begins with found film that he painstakingly cuts up, reassembles, and alters. He also sandwiches detritus and found materials—from insects to dirt, dust, and glue—between two glass plates and then projects the resulting image onto the gallery wall. Through his reuse of analogue photographic materials, Price produces beautiful, abstracted images connected to histories of appropriation, abstraction, and experimental film.

Light Fracture is one of two slide works Price made in 2013 that are now held by the ICA/Boston (the other being Number 9, acquired from that year’s Foster Prize exhibition at the museum). Using slide projectors, he presents the handmade slides as a cycle of moving still images, an arrangement that connects his work to animation and early cinematic tropes. The individual images vary dramatically—from the microscopic to the macroscopic, from silhouettes of monstrous insects to beautiful abstract patterns, from dark earthy tones to brilliant reds and oranges—but taken as a whole, the series consistently captures light as it is projected, refracted, and splintered through the materials. The result is a visually arresting experience that evokes entropy, mortality, and otherworldly visions.

This piece contributes to the ICA/Boston’s ongoing support of Boston artists, joining works by artists such as Taylor Davis, Kelly Sherman, and others. Additionally, it makes a strong addition to the collection by broadening the conversation around painterly abstraction in photography and film by artists such as Kader Attia, Noriko Furunishi, and Pipilotti Rist.

2014.09

Trevor Paglen’s artwork draws on his long-time interest in investigative journalism and the social sciences, as well as his training as a geographer. His work seeks to show the hidden aesthetics of American surveillance and military systems, touching on espionage, the digital circulation of images, government development of weaponry, and secretly funded military projects. The artist has conducted extensive research on the subject and published a series of books and lectures about covert operations undertaken by the CIA and the Pentagon.

Since the 1990s, Paglen has photographed isolated military air bases located in Nevada and Utah using a telescopic camera lens. Untitled (Reaper Drone) reveals a miniature drone midflight against a luminous morning skyscape. The drone is nearly imperceptible, suggested only as a small black speck at the bottom of the image. The artist’s photographs are taken at such a distance that they abstract the scene and distort our capacity to make sense of the image. His work both exposes hidden secrets and challenges assumptions about what can be seen and fully understood.

Paglen’s Untitled (Reaper Drone) enriches the ICA/Boston’s collection of photography and is in productive conversation with works by such artists as Jenny Holzer and Hito Steyerl, which similarly deal with political and economic systems, secrecy, and surveillance.

800.13.05

Nicholas Nixon is a photographer known for his work in portraiture and documentary, his use of the 8-by-10-inch view camera, and his engagement with duration. In numerous series, Nixon gets to know his subjects while photographing them, making the role of time inherent to the medium of photography an integral part of the content and process of his work. His photographs possess a high degree of detail and often present closely cropped views of his subjects. Nixon came to Boston in the 1970s and has taught at the Massachusetts College of Art for more than thirty-five years, while making important documentation of his neighborhood and community.

For Nixon’s hallmark series People with AIDS, the artist followed fifteen men with the disease, sensitively conveying its uncompromisingly harsh progress during the years when the government and medical establishment’s neglect turned AIDS into a crisis of epic proportions. A portion of the series was included in Nixon’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1988. By the time the series was published as a book in 1991, all the subjects had passed away due to the disease. At the time of the exhibition, the works drew strongly opposed reactions from critics: while Douglas Crimp described them as perpetuating stereotypes about people with AIDS and as lacking social context, others characterized them as empathetic, humanistic, and corrective to moralizing judgments. This set of five prints depicts George Gannett from October 1987 until his death in February 1989. The photographs show Gannett in his home in Providence, Rhode Island, accompanied by his partner, petting his cat, and lying in a bed near the end of his battle with the disease. The ordinariness and domesticity of Gannett’s existence permeate the images.

This work contributes to the ICA/Boston’s strength in photography, especially by artists of the so-called Boston School, including Nan Goldin. It also joins a work that deals explicitly with the AIDS crisis by Ray Navarro and Zoe Leonard.

2013.09.1-5

Yasumasa Morimura uses imaging and photographic technology to investigate the genre of history painting in contemporary art. By also inserting himself into all of his images, Morimura creates an extended meditation on the complicated nature of narrative, portraiture, and mythology, showing how the contemporary individual is always rooted in historical precedent. Brothers (A Late Autumn Prayer) is inspired by French artist Jean-François Millet’s The Angelus (1857–59), in which two laboring peasants pray with bowed heads in a field. In lieu of the setting sun in Millet’s painting, Morimura has placed within his photograph the iconic image of a mushroom cloud, the atmospheric impact of a post-nuclear explosion. Other changes Morimura has made to Millet’s tableaux include farm tools exchanged for handguns and rifles, and himself posing as a peasant warrior rather than a tenant laborer. A powerfully visual comment on the devastation of war and nuclear disaster on the relationships between peoples and with the natural environment, Morimura’s photograph questions idyllic representations of history in the wake of historical violence.

2013.08

Working in sculpture, photography, performance, and video, Mona Hatoum—like her peers Robert Gober, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Doris Salcedo, and Rachel Whiteread—defamiliarizes ordinary domestic objects and transforms them into minimalist, conceptual, and performative art objects. Corrupting the essential features and functions of items such as kitchen utensils or household furniture, she infuses benign forms with the capacity to harm. Hatoum engages viewers’ tactile imagination, provoking them to imagine their own bodies responding to these newly aggressive objects. The multiple and often contradictory allusions contrast the comfort and safety provided by the domestic realm with the history of violent conflict in the London-based Palestinian artist’s homeland.

This photograph documents an early performance during which the artist trudged barefoot through the streets of Brixton—an ethnically diverse, working-class suburb of London—dragging heavy, black Dr. Marten boots tied to her ankles. This particular style of boots was worn by both the British police and skinheads, overt opponents during the racially charged history of early 1980s London. Hatoum’s bare feet allude to the vulnerability of ethnic minorities in face of the violence and discrimination of a public authority charged with community protection.

Performance Still is part of a significant grouping of works by Hatoum at the ICA/Boston, and it engages with other many other works that explore performance, such as those by Ragnar Kjartansson, Yasumasa Morimura, and Cindy Sherman.

2014.21

Rineke Dijkstra’s apparently straightforward portraits divulge her perceptions of her sitters through the smallest details and subtlest facial expressions. She is concerned with balancing her subjects’ deliberate self-presentation with their unwitting self-revelation.

In 1998, in connection with an upcoming exhibition at the Herzliya Museum of Art in Israel, Dijkstra undertook a new body of work in which she recorded young men and women who had joined the Israeli army. She took photographs of the men after a shooting exercise and the women on their first day of enlistment. Since then, Dijkstra has returned to Israel frequently to follow some of these original sitters and to document new recruits.

These two photographs of “Evgenya” were taken in 2003—the first on the day she was inducted, still in civilian clothes, and the second eight months later, in uniform. With this knowledge, we search Evgenya’s face, clothing, even hairstyle for clues as to if (and how) military service has transformed this striking young woman. Does she look fearful or apprehensive on her first day? Does she seem more confident in uniform? We might expect Evgenya’s fatigues to dampen her individuality, yet even in an army uniform her assertive self-expression is evident in her dark eyeliner, wispy bangs, and sure gaze.

This photograph exemplifies Dijkstra’s ability to capture the complexity of an individual through multiple images and social and political frames. The ICA/Boston made an early commitment to this artist, organizing one of her first U.S. museum exhibitions in 2001. This commitment was reinforced by the acquisition of this work, the first by Dijkstra to enter the collection.

2006.14

Andy Warhol, a leading figure in the 1960s pop art movement, began his career as a successful magazine and ad illustrator and later pioneered a wide variety of art forms, including performance art, filmmaking, video installations, and writing. His work uniquely challenged preconceived notions about the nature of art and erased traditional distinctions between fine art and popular culture.

From 1969 to 1975, Warhol created a series of Red Books, which were culled from over one hundred small red Holson Polaroid albums. Each book contains thirteen to twenty-two unique Polaroid Type 107 black-and-white, or Polacolor 108, photographs selected and organized by Warhol. The Red Books provide 203 intimate, snapshot-style images of the eclectic world of Hollywood movie and TV personalities, rock stars, art celebrities, and wealthy socialites. Each album is themed around a certain event, location, or a particular personality. Unlike Warhol’s silkscreen portraits, these images were spontaneous and affectionate. The photographs playfully depict subjects in different locations, including Warhol’s Factory, his summer retreat in Montauk, overseas, and during casual gatherings. Many of the images are signed and dedicated “To Andy Love,” “For Andy, a Great Talent,” or “To Andy Peace.”

Red Book Prefix F158 depicts a series of photographs taken during a weekend in Montauk with the Kennedy and Radziwill offspring (John Kennedy, Jr., Jed Johnson, and Anthony Radziwill). The photos are candid portraits of Warhol with the children, and the children playing on the beach or wrestling in the bedroom. There is a freshness and intimacy in the snapshots uncharacteristic of Warhol’s work. He gives special attention to the subjects’ clothing and hairstyles, not only offering insight into their personalities and rank in society, but also creating an offhand portrait of American culture at the time. The use of the Polaroid camera combines two of Warhol’s interests: the tendency toward disposability in modern consumerism and the photograph as readymade. The near-instant capacity of the Polaroid process meant that the photographs could be passed around, admired, and written on moments after the event or individual had been captured.

As an important influence on and precursor to art of the 1980s, Red Book Prefix F158 provides an addition to other series of portraits in the ICA/Boston’s collection, such as those by Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin, Nicholas Nixon, and Collier Schorr.

2014.01.1–21

Sara VanDerBeek investigates the representation of three-dimensional sculpture through the two-dimensional lens of photography. She painstakingly builds sculptures in order to photograph them, disassembling the objects as soon as the documentation is complete. The sculptures thus quickly come to exist only as images. This process inserts VanDerBeek into ongoing debates about what is gained and lost when viewers experience sculpture through photographic images, and the play between the three-dimensionality of one medium versus the two-dimensionality of another.

Medusa is a photograph of an assemblage VanDerBeek created in her studio. The temporary sculpture is a totem of images of historical sculptures, ranging from classical statuary and friezes to a work by the turn-of-the-century Italian artist Medardo Rosso. At the bottom of the objects is a piece of contemporary jewelry. One key element is a red-tinted photograph of Medusa, a figure from Greek mythology who turns humans into stone with her gaze, a process that can be analogized with photography, especially photography of classical sculpture. The work registers VanDerBeek’s engagement with art-historical references and contemporary modes of image making.

The ICA/Boston has strong holdings in photography and sculpture, and VanDerBeek’s Medusa brings these two strengths together while adding a new artist to those represented in the growing collection.

2015.04

Since the mid-1980s, Lorna Simpson has examined the interplay between fact and fiction, and identity and history, in photographic works that often combine text and image. Using both found images and studio photography, Simpson undermines assumptions about race and gender within American culture, subjecting these ideas to insightful reexamination.

The twelve parts shown here are a selection of works from Simpson’s series, May June July August ’57/’09, a body of work that, according to the artist, “critiques photography but also the power of imagery, and also the power of race and sexuality.” Made of 123 pairs of photographs, the series brings together two kinds of images: found pin-up images of young Black women (whom the artist identifies as aspiring actresses or models) in Los Angeles from 1957 and the artist’s recreation of these images that she made in 2009. The juxtaposition of the original photographs with Simpson’s mirrored own blurs the lines between history and art, creating a fictionalized narrative within which the depicted characters take part. Key to Simpson is the artifice inherent to the performances in these photographic pairs, and how performing, or posing, for the camera requires playing to notions of identity and the expectation of being seen. Part archival exploration and part performance, May June July August ’57/’09 is a complex investigation of history, femininity, and race.

800.13.04

Louise Lawler explores the changing context in which works of art are viewed and circulated. Since the late 1970s she has worked primarily in photography and has become best known for shooting art objects in collectors’ homes, museums, auction houses, commercial galleries, and corporate offices, whether installed above copier machines or piled on loading docks and in storage closets. In these sites, she frames the strategies of display—from the works’ labels to their location—to bring attention to the ways spaces shape the meaning and reception of art after it leaves the studio. Her work is often associated with institutional critique for its exposure of art world machinations, and with the so-called Pictures Generation, a group of artists that includes Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, and others, known for their strategies of appropriation. Witty and trenchant, Lawler’s photographs are more than mirrors in which the art world sees itself; they reposition the viewer to engage critically and affectively with art’s presentation and dissemination.

Grieving Mothers (Attachment) is part of a series in which Lawler documents casts of antiquities held by various international institutions. It depicts plaster casts of the wings of the Nike of Samothrace, c. 190 BCE, perhaps one of the most recognizable objects of Hellenic sculpture, in the collection of the Musée du Louvre in Paris. To further complicate the idea of originality and reproduction, the original marble has missing portions filled in with plaster. Lawler shows the wings detached from the figure’s torso, the mechanism of attachment visible. Due to the close cropping and angled framing, the viewer can perceive the wings as sculptural objects divorced from their grand and dynamic referent. In such pieces, Lawler complicates our perception of authenticity and its relationship to form.

Lawler’s Grieving Mothers (Attachment) builds on the ICA/Boston’s holdings of work by contemporary photographers, especially those who came of age artistically in the 1980s, such as Nan Goldin, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman. Moreover, it adds to the group of works by younger photographers who explore the ways three-dimensional forms can be captured through photography, such as Roe Ethridge, Erin Shirreff, and Sara VanDerBeek, many of whom consider Lawler a key figure in the development of their practices.

2015.16