Antoine Catala: Distant Feel
Exhibition in Carnegie Museum of Art’s Forum Gallery
February 14–May 18, 2015
Shannon Ebner: Auto Body Collision
Artist book published by Carnegie Museum of Art
Available May 2015
Carnegie Museum of Art
4400 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA
www.cmoa.org
www.nowseethis.org
Both commissioned projects are part of Orphaned Images, an investigation within the Hillman Photography Initiative that addresses questions raised within art practice by the increasingly widespread digital dissemination of photographs. As images are shared, manipulated, recirculated, and reused, they lose authorship, and become itinerant. Attentive to the shifting role of the photographic image in society, Orphaned Images explores the intersections and collisions of humans and technology in the contemporary world.
Antoine Catala: Distant Feel is the first solo US museum exhibition of the New York–based French artist. It presents a new body of work in sculpture, photography, and video that addresses the way that images provoke emotion, especially as they travel virtual and physical distances via the internet. Catala’s work takes an interest in the myriad ways we express feelings, through the very technology that increasingly mediates our daily lives. Catala is developing a new approach to the sentiment of empathy, conceived in collaboration with the New York advertising agency Droga5. This new form of empathy is embodied in both a symbol and the catch phrase “distant feel,” both of which will be employed in the exhibition and online. Catala shares the campaign, with more information, at distantfeel.com. This project is a co-commission with the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and will be presented on the occasion of their 2015 Triennial (February 25–May 24, 2015).
Shannon Ebner’s publication Auto Body Collision continues the artist’s ongoing investigation into the dialogue between word and image in a new series of over 200 photographs that comprise a long-form poem. In this new series Ebner employs the automobile and automation as metaphor, meditating on the “collision” between bodies and machines. The book serves as a natural medium for Ebner’s preoccupation with language, wordplay, and the contemporary economy of images. Auto Body Collision will include essays by curators Alex Klein, Tina Kukielski, and designer Mark Owens.
Orphaned Images is organized by Tina Kukielski, curator of the Hillman Photography Initiative and co-curator of the 2013 Carnegie International at Carnegie Museum of Art, and Alex Klein, the Dorothy and Stephen R. Weber (CHE’60) Program Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania.
The Hillman Photography Initiative at Carnegie Museum of Art is an incubator for innovative thinking on the photographic image. The Initiative’s inaugural cycle of projects investigates the lifecycle of images: their creation, transmission, consumption, storage, potential loss, and reemergence. Technology accelerates the pace of this cycle, and often alters or redirects the trajectory of an image in unexpected, powerful ways. Encounter these projects at nowseethis.org.
