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Penelope Umbrico’s work is as much a study of photography as it is photography. She looks for images in the public realm that depict ideas of beauty, status, intimacy and love – specifically those images that elicit desire. The focus is on publicly accessible often corporate, or corporate-sponsored “private” spaces promoting idealized life-styles. Through re-photographing, scan, and screen-capture, Umbrico selects details in the images that point to a deflation or rupture in the idealized fictions. Collecting, compiling, de-contextualizing and re-contextualizing this material, makes Umbrico a 21st Century archivist, and through her re-appropriation of the imagery the viewer is confronted with a new perceived value, meaning and function.
Cultural manifestations of absence and erasure are a constant theme in this work, especially with regard to technologies that promise visibility, community and intimacy, such as photography and the Internet in turn questioning the idea of the democratization of media

As Is

TVs For Sale/TVs From Craigslist

Deutsche Bank Fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts.

We are very pleased with a review in the Washington Post for our current exhibit 'As Is' by Penelope Umbrico, and on the editorial page of Rhizome at the New Museum by Jacob Gaboury, also in the Brooklyn Rail by Patricia Milder.

Penelope Umbrico's featured article in FOAM is out on the stands or view it online. She also received a review in the Village Voice for her recent exhibit at BAM.read more and she was mentioned in the NYTimes in regards of her work at SFMoMA. read more