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Shannon Ebner mines the correlations between language and photography. Drawing on a wide range of texts—from poetry and experimental writing to Indian sign language and political speech—she builds letters and phrases out of vernacular materials such as cardboard and cinder blocks, and then photographs the results. Set up in either her studio or outdoors, these impermanent arrangements call attention to the variant ways in which meaning is constructed.

In The Day–Sob–Dies, Ebner has assembled the titular phrase in a lilting, cursive script and then suspended it between two thin sticks in an overgrown field at the outskirts of Los Angeles. The “Sob” positioned between dashes might mean the intrusion of an outburst in the phrase, but it could also be read as the acronym for “son of a bitch.” As with most of Ebner’s texts, the exact meaning is cryptic but clearly full of significance, especially with the phrase, alluding to the margin between life and death, situated in what appears to be the scrubby outskirts of a city.

This photograph builds on the ICA/Boston’s strong holdings in photography and enhances the collection of language-based works. It can be compellingly paired with studio-based photographs by Leslie Hewitt and Sara VanDerBeek or with works by Roni Horn, Ray Navarro, Kelly Sherman, and Lorna Simpson that also utilize written language.

2017.22

Rineke Dijkstra is best known for her striking and intimate portraits and videos of young people. Shooting her subjects frontally, she often presents individuals in moments of transition—women after childbirth, newly displaced child refugees, and young military recruits—and focuses on the evocativeness of the subject’s expression, pose, or gesture.

Trained at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam from 1981 to 1986, the artist continues to live in the city. She began the series of which this work forms a part during a residency at the German Academic Exchanges Service’s (DAAD) Artists-in-Residence program. For the series, the artist photographed adolescents in Tiergarten, one of the most popular parks in Berlin, as well as in a park in Lithuania. Tiergarten, Berlin, August 13, 2000 exemplifies the tenuous biographical moments Dijkstra is celebrated for capturing. The boy seems apprehensive: his shoulders are raised and he gazes sideways at something outside the frame. The artist works with a large-format camera, which requires a long exposure during which her sitters must maintain their pose, which may explain to a degree the subject’s awkward stance. By titling the work with the name of the locale rather than the boy, Dijkstra shifts attention away from his individuality, locating his experience, like that of so many his age, in the unsettling moment somewhere between the knowable present and the unpredictable future.

This photograph add to the ICA/Boston’s strong collection of works by Dijkstra, and joins other documentary-style photographs and portraits in the collection by such artists as Roe Ethridge, Nan Goldin, Catherine Opie, and Collier Schorr.

2016.07

Liz Deschenes is known for lushly beautiful and meditative work in photography and sculpture that probes the relationship between the mechanics of seeing, image-making processes, and modes of display. She employs various photographic technologies to explore the symbolic power of color and creates sculptural installations that respond to a site’s unique features.

Green screens are commonly used as backdrops in television, film, and video game production to introduce special effects. They are typically invisible to viewers, but in Green Screen #4 Deschenes makes them both subject and object. A 15-foot-long monochrome photograph mounted on Duratrans, a material used for commercial photography displays, Green Screen #4 is a stand-in for the thing it depicts.

This acquisition introduces a new artist to the ICA/Boston collection—one with connections to Boston and to the ICA’s exhibition program—and also an innovative artwork that pushes photography into the realm of sculpture and installation, an interest also reflected in the collection works by Leslie Hewitt, Erin Shirreff, and Sara VanDerBeek. Green Screen #4 builds on the museum’s strength in photography and sculpture while also diversifying these holdings and offering visitors a novel engagement with these media.

2016.01

Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra’s work presents a contemporary take on the portrait. The temporality of photography is essential in Dijkstra’s work. The artist sensitively captures her subjects in states of significant transition: adolescents on the beach, newly enlisted young adults, and mothers with their newborns or infants. A photograph presents a past moment, and Dijkstra’s portraits lie at the threshold of activity, either before or after an event transpires. The setting is typically devoid of extraneous details, highlighting only the evocative nature of the subject’s facial and bodily expressions.

Dubrovnik, Croatia, July 13, 1996 is part of a series of twenty portraits that document the innocence and awkwardness of adolescence. Taken across Europe and the East Coast of the United States, the images are titled with location and date without reference to the subject’s name. Dubrovnik, Croatia, July 13, 1996 depicts two young boys, presumably brothers, wearing seemingly indistinguishable bathing suits. Beyond slight differences in the way the boys hold their arms, their stances are nearly identical. This image draws upon the rich tradition of images of bathers in art history.

This photograph expands the ICA/Boston’s holdings of work by Rineke Dijkstra, one of the most influential photographers working today, and registers the museum’s early support of the artist in 2001, when the ICA organized her first museum survey. It joins a strong collection of artwork that addresses identity and the human form.

2012.10