Gathering much of her subject matter from mail order catalogs, the source images Penelope Umbrico uses are almost always meant to make us desire something. Umbrico selects, categorizes and isolates one element from a larger image. Often these images are scanned and re-printed for exhibition. Penelope Umbrico’s Your Choice is a looping video of hundreds of instances of the text “your choice” from the advertisements in a Sunday edition of the New York Times.
About the artist: Penelope Umbrico is Chair of MFA Photography at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. Umbrico received her MFA at the School of Visual Arts, New York. She has had solo exhibitions at Julie Saul Gallery and International Center of Photography, New York; Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston; Montgomery (Alabama) Museum of Fine Art. Recent awards include Aaron Siskind Foundation Individual Photographer’s Fellowship Grant and the New York Foundation of the Arts, Fellowship Grant among others.
–Paho Mann, Asst. Professor of Photography, University of North Texas
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