09/21/2022
The ƒ/Ø Project is pleased to present its first project with Matthew Ritchie. Generations is an infinite iterative series of unique albumen prints. Each print is 16x16 inches on a 20x24 inch sheet.
The images in this series are related to Ritchie's recent body of work A Garden in the Machine which includes paintings, drawings, film and sculpture. The entire project is an outgrowth of Ritchie’s experimentation with a type of machine learning known as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which treat images as data from which to develop new imagery. Each one of the prints in this series is a unique iteration of the output of the machine's processing, mirroring the way the GAN constantly produces new images with every new piece of "information" fed into it.
For more information about this project please visit:
https://f-zeroproject.com/matthew-ritchie.html
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11/02/2021
We are thrilled to announce another new project with Michelle Stuart: Timeless Land. This is the third suite of ambrotypes Stuart has produced with The ƒ/Ø Project and is a companion to the previous two works Night Over Alice Springs and Orkney Islands Time.
For Timeless Land Stuart takes an abstracted approach to her usual subject matter. It is a more subjective and personal exploration of how humans interact with and assign symbolic value to the landscape. This time she exploits photography's association with memory, rendering the landscape as if in a dream, which she thinks of as "foreign territory making an appearance when least we expect it."
Edition of 5 with one artist's proof, one printer's proof and one BAT.
For more information about this project please visit:
https://f-zeroproject.com/michelle-stuart.html
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10/12/2021
The ƒ/Ø Project is pleased to announce a new project with Suzy Lake; a six panel work comprised of salt prints Extended Breathing, in an edition of 5 with one artist's proof, one printer's proof and one BAT. This is Lake's first published work with historic techniques.
"Recording full breath, breathing," Lake explains, "is a celebration of life that required me to stand perfectly still before the camera for a set duration; accordingly, chest movement and torso sway were recorded while my feet remained anchored as crisp and detailed as the landscape. Yet, in the excess of the one-hour exposure, the recorded activity stops being a photographic document. What may have begun as endurance at one point in the project’s development becomes the gesture’s full durational movement through the slow shutter speed."
For more information about this project please visit:
https://f-zeroproject.com/suzy-lake.html
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09/27/2021
The ƒ/Ø Project is pleased to announce its second project with Michelle Stuart; a nine panel ambrotype Orkney Islands Time, in an edition of 5 with one artist's proof, one printer's proof and one BAT. This is a companion piece to Stuart's first ambrotype Night Over Alice Springs. Each 8x10 inch panel is housed in a metal frame, complete with museum glass to reveal the luminous character of the brilliant silver surface of the ambrotypes. Total dimensions approximately 26x34 inches.
Orkney Islands Time continues Stuart's interest in the ways humans interact with the landscape - how the landscape takes on symbolic as well as practical value, and how humans use and think about place. The isolation of the far north with its rock walls and ancient monoliths is captured and frozen. Stuart says "there is stillness everywhere, as though someone will return and all has stopped until they return... but the return will never come."
For more information about this project please visit:
https://f-zeroproject.com/michelle-stuart.html
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The ƒ/Ø Project is pleased to present its first project with artist Carroll Dunham. Male Gaze is a suite of eight hand-drawn cliché verre salt prints, published in an edition of 5 with two artist's proofs, one printer's proof and one BAT. Each image is 8x10 inches on a 16x20 sheet. The prints are available individually. A special cliché verre colophon drawn by the artist is included with purchase of the full set. Dunham has a decades-long practice as a printmaker, yet this marks his first exploration with historic photographic printing techniques.
Dunham's work often critically examines gender stereotypes and performance. This suite is the first time that Dunham has depicted male and female figures together. The "gaze" is a metaphor for normative power dynamics and scrutinizes the way they are represented in visual culture. Each of the eight images is a variation on the same picture which becomes the armature on top of which Dunham constructs and re-constructs this perennial story.
The cliche verre technique dates to the 1850s and starts with a sheet of glass covered with candle soot, through which the artist draws revealing the clear glass beneath. While technically photographic, Dunham considers this project part of his extensive exploration of approaches to printmaking since the mid-1980s. Dunham likened the feeling of making marks on the soot-covered plates to “drawing in air with light.”
For more information about this project please visit:
https://f-zeroproject.com/carroll-dunham.html
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The ƒ/Ø Project sends warmest congratulations to Christine Zuercher for her participation in the Akron Art Museum's Making Your Mark exhibition. This virtual exhibition features monotypes from Zuercher's Distant Transmissions series done in collaboration with The ƒ/Ø Project during her artist residency.
Distant Transmissions explores ways in which the subjectivity of photography can be used to re-write and re-imagine a history. The nature of the gum-bichromate printmaking technique illuminates the tension between photography as an implied recording device and our desire to re-experience memories.
Exhibition info: https://akronartmuseum.org/exhibitions/making-your-mark/
Museum Interview: On Process: Christine Zuercher:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwV9Iv0ZEzA
For more information on this project please visit:
http://f-zeroproject.com/christine-zuercher.html
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The ƒ/Ø Project is pleased to present its first project with Paul Mpagi Sepuya - A suite of six salt prints, 10 x 7.5 inches on an 11 x 14 sheet, in an edition of five with two artist's proofs, one printer's proof and one BAT. This is Sepuya's first foray into historic printmaking techniques.
Known for his complex, multi-layered works that incorporate and reference historical as well as contemporary ideas around photographic representation, Paul Mpagi Sepuya's photographs hover ambiguously between recognizable and abstract imagery. Most of the photographs are ostensibly portraits, and Sepuya mobilizes the vast history of that tradition, yet, simultaneously challenges the viewer to identify exactly what or whom they are perceiving.
Sepuya says this project is a study by the artist "of black material in reproduction and subject position. Digital photographs produced as salt-paper prints present questions about the fidelity of black as an unfixed value. Sepuya (Black) holds, presses, and affixes an unexposed Fuji Instant Film Print (black) against cut and torn work prints depicting fragments of bodies embracing in varying shades of (Black). These differing blacks collapsed through language as singularly Black rendered in the soft, warm tones of the salt paper prints, one of the earliest photographic printing technologies, notably used by Henry Fox Talbot in his series Bust of Patroclus (1843) This is the beginning of a larger process of research that references the history of photography through various white and black subjects from Talbot to Minor White, Robert Mapplethorpe to Rotimi Fani-Kayode."
For more information about this project, please see:
The ƒ/Ø Project: Paul Mpagi Sepuya
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The ƒ/Ø Project is pleased to announce participation in our first art fair, the Editions/Artists’ Books Fair (E/AB) online edition 2020.
Hosted by the Lower East Side Printship, Inc. (NYC) the E/AB fair comprises small to mid-size printmaking studios and publishers from around the country and internationally.
The ƒ/Ø Project is a printmaking and publishing studio focusing on photography. Built on the model of twentieth-century printmaking studios like Tamarind and Gemini, rather than that of a photo-lab, The ƒ/Ø Project works collaboratively with artists making unique and editioned works. Our participation in the E/AB Fair is an opportunity to bridge the gap between the worlds of photographic technology and printmaking.
We will announce more details about E/AB, our featured artists and some new projects shortly.
For additional info about the fair and its participants please visit: eabfair.org
For more information about The ƒ/Ø Project project, please visit:
http://www.f-zeroproject.com/about.html
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The ƒ/Ø Project is pleased to announce the exhibition:
Analogues: Doug Harvey
UCR/California Museum of Photography, Riverside, California
February 1st, 2020 to July 12th, 2020
Reception: Saturday, February 29th from 6 - 8pm
This is the first public exhibition of the 3-color carbon transfer prints from Harvey's MOLDY SLIDES: THE ERINNERUNGEN AN VERLASSENE ZUKÜNFTE SUITE published by The ƒ/Ø Project and complements Color Shift an exhibition of color photography from UCR's permanent collection, curated by Leigh Gleason.
Additionally, a live performance of Harvey's Moldy Slide Show with accompanying music will be held. Date and time of the performance forthcoming.
For additional information about the exhibition please visit:
https://artsblock.ucr.edu/Exhibition/doug-harvey
For more information about this project, please see:
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The ƒ/Ø Project is pleased to announce a new project with Doug Harvey. A suite of four 3-color carbon transfer prints from Harvey’s renowned Moldy Slideshow. Printed in an edition of 5, plus one artist’s proof, one printer’s proof and one BAT. Each image is approximately 8x13 inches on a 14x17 sheet.
Doug Harvey’s Moldy Slide project began with a chance discovery of a cache of discarded amateur photographic transparencies dating to the 1970s in the piles of material being disposed of during an apparent hoarder intervention. The once personal narrative contained in the travel photographs had been altered, obscured and even destroyed by the natural processes of decay and the ravages of time in a manner analogous to the effects of memory loss.
This 3-color carbon transfer technique is a new hybrid process. Based on the 19th-century color carbon printing technique, originally designed for monochrome images, it has been modified by The ƒ/Ø Project using early twentieth century experimental color printing technologies to create full color images.
For more information please see:
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The ƒ/Ø Project is pleased to announce its first project with Michelle Stuart; a nine panel ambrotype Night Over Alice Springs, in an edition of 5 with one artist's proof, one printer's proof and one BAT. This marks Stuart's first excursion into historic photographic techniques. Each 8x10 inch panel is housed in a metal frame, complete with museum glass to reveal the luminous character of the brilliant silver surface of the ambrotypes. Total dimensions approximately 26x34 inches.
Stuart wrote about Alice Springs:
My first night in Australia, the land of my father, I stayed in a converted workers bunk house on a cattle station in the middle of that continent and outside of Alice Springs. It was black as pitch outside and the red earth was dry. I had closed the curtains when I switched on the light. Turning in for the night I opened the curtains to see the whole window covered with white moths attracted by what was the only light for miles. With the stars of the southern hemisphere as a background the moths created diaphanous forms against the moon.
For more information please see:
The ƒ/Ø Project: Michelle Stuart
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The ƒ/Ø Project is proud to announce a new project with Christine Zuercher: Dreams of Planet Earth, a follow up to her series Distant Transmissions, produced with The ƒ/Ø Project in 2016. Dreams of Planet Earth is a suite of eight cyanotypes, in an edition of 5 plus one artist's proof, one printer's proof and one BAT.
Both projects are part of an ongoing series of work investigating our cultural relationship with space travel. A native of Ohio, Zuercher has long been exploring the hold on the popular imagination of the possibilities and utopian visions associated with space. In these two bodies of work Zuercher takes a critical look at not only the history of space travel, but also historical futurism and nostalgia.
Zuercher says of the work:
Distant Transmissions examines the history of exploration and communication technology through photographs, objects, performance, and sound. The prints illuminate the tension between the innate ability of the photograph to record and our desire to re-experience the past through memory. The series Dreams of Planet Earth is an addendum to Distant Transmissions and examines how photographic stills create a larger map of memories. The Cyanotype process references the Voyager Probes and Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. The series explores how one might view planetary experiences from a great distance.
For more information please see:
The ƒ/Ø Project: Christine Zuercher
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The ƒ/Ø Project is pleased to announce its first project with Alyson Shotz; a suite of four salt print photograms The Universe in a Grain of Salt. It is published in an edition of 5 with one artist's proof, one printer's proof and one BAT. Sheet size 14x17 inches.
Shotz is internationally recognized for her room-sized sculptures and installations that often use industrial materials to produce delicate effects that exploit the play of light in the environment and with the viewer. They have, what Derek Eller called, "a luminous gravity.... a seamless, elegant manipulation of light and shadow as weightless and abstract as breathing." Shotz also occasionally uses photography to capture these same effects. This project, however, marks her first foray into the world of historic photographic techniques.
A solo exhibition of her work Un/Folding is currently on view at the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chatanooga, TN through May 27th, 2019.
For more information please see:
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The ƒ/Ø Project is pleased to announce its first project with artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. This suite of ten hand-pulled lampblack carbon transfer prints was inspired by their project Spirit is a Bone. Printed in an edition of 5, plus one artist's proof, one printer's proof and one BAT.
For more information please see:
The ƒ/Ø Project: Broomberg & Chanarin
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For more information please see:
The ƒ/Ø Project: Spencer Finch
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In honor of the 150th anniversary of George Ellery Hale's birth.
Exhibition, Reception June 30th and July 1st on the mountain.
The ƒ/Ø Project is pleased to announce a special collaborative project with the Mount Wilson Observatory, in celebration of George Ellery Hale's 150th birthday. A selection of original glass plate negatives from the archives have been printed for a special exhibition taking place at the Observatory Museum.
Please join us for a reception on the mountain the weekend of June 30 and July 1, 2018. Other special events will take place over the two days, including exclusive viewing through the historic 100 inch telescope until 1 a.m. For more details, please visit: https://www.mtwilson.edu/hales-150th/
Since it's founding in 1904 the Mount Wilson Observatory has been responsible for some of the most important events in the history of modern science including Edwin Hubble's discovery of galaxies outside of our own, and with Milton Humason the discovery that the universe is expanding. From 1905 into the 1980s the astronomers at Mount Wilson made photographic records of their observations. Some of these, like images of the Sun and the Moon, are recognizable to us as pictures. Others manifest only as information. While this latter group may seem to us decipherable only to scientists with specialized knowledge, they too, are a way of representing the world through the medium of photography. The images in this exhibition were either made directly by Hale, dating back as far as the 1890s, or under his supervision. Many are experimental both in their scientific approach and in their photographic techniques. A special essay by historian Melissa Lo will be published to accompany the exhibition.
For more information on this project, please see:
The ƒ/Ø Project, Special Projects: Mount Wilson
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04/05/18
The ƒ/Ø Project congratulates David Maisel, recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation 2018 Fellowship.
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The ƒ/Ø Project is pleased to announce its inaugural portfolio with David Maisel. This set of nine hand-coated, gold-toned albumen prints in a handmade cloth portfolio box is in an edition of five with one artist's proof, one printer's proof and one BAT.
For more information please see:
The ƒ/Ø Project: David Maisel.