Casemore Kirkeby presents Newsroom by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, with additional works by Dru Donovan, Jim Goldberg, Hank Willis Thomas and Carmen Winant, on view from September 7, 2019 through November 16, 2019.
During Newsroom, a newly produced portfolio of gelatin silver prints made from Sultan and Mandel’s original 1983 negatives will be shown for the first time. Also exhibited will be mural sized prints, made from these same 1983 negatives.
Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s Newsroom debuted at University of California at Berkeley and Pacific Film Archive in 1983, curated by Constance Lewallen. Using the museum’s Matrix Gallery as their studio, Mandel and Sultan riffed off their previous ten years of collaborative projects, exploring and playing with mass-media imagery. This time, Sultan and Mandel installed AP and UPI wire machines as the source for the nearly 300 images delivered daily to the gallery. Occupying the gallery-studio every day, the two artists found fodder for their installation by scrutinizing these incoming images, not for their assigned meaning or news content, but according to their whims as artists. Finding their way through each day’s raft of images from all over the world, they curated an ever-evolving installation on the gallery walls and floor. Images were freed from text, re-photographed and their context reassigned. Some were installed in poetic juxtaposition or enlarged to mural scale, while others were used as evidence for creating visual graphs illustrating made-up data and fake news. Those images not selected to re-photograph were tossed on the gallery floor, creating an ever-growing sea of rejects.
Concurrently presented are works by Dru Donovan, Jim Goldberg, Hank Willis Thomas and Carmen Winant. These four artists explore the image isolated from its presumed meaning and expected context. Each artist’s work exacts a shift in emphasis away from what is widely understood as assigned meaning, and sheds light on what is frequently unquestioned or unseen. The often anonymous mechanisms by which vast numbers of images are created and distributed, as well as the accustomed formats for consuming information, are also challenged and incorporated in their work.
Larry Sultan (b.1950, Brooklyn, NY, d.2009, Greenbrae, CA) served as a Distinguished Professor of Photography at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. His work is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he was also recognized with the Bay Area Treasure Award in 2005. He is also known for his seminal photobook Evidence, a collaborative project with photographer Mike Mandel, as well as numerous other publications.
Mike Mandel (b.1950, Los Angeles, CA) is an American conceptual artist and photographer based in Watertown, MA. Mandel’s work questions the meaning of photographic imagery within popular culture and draws from snapshots, advertising, news photographs, and public and corporate archives. Along with Larry Sultan, he is best known for the photobook Evidence. Mandel has exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and his work is in the permanent collections of major institutions around the world.
Dru Donovan (b. St. Paul, MN) received a BFA in photography from California College of the Arts in 2004 and an MFA in photography from Yale School of Art in 2009, where she was awarded the Richard Benson prize for excellence. Her work has been included in “reGeneration2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today” at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, and in the 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. In 2011 TBW Books published her first book, Lifting Water. She was awarded a 2011-2012 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace residency and was appointed lecturer in photography at Yale in 2011. Donovan lives and works in Portland, OR.
Jim Goldberg (b.1953, New Haven, CT) is best known for his bodies of work exploring experimental storytelling and the potentials of combining image and text. His many acclaimed publications include Rich and Poor (1977-85), Raised by Wolves (1985-95), Hospice (1992-93), and Open See (2003). Goldberg’s work is in numerous private and public collections, including MoMA, SFMOMA, Whitney Museum of Art, The Getty, LACMA, MFA Boston, National Gallery of Art, Musee de la Photographie, and the Art Institute of Chicago. A Magnum photographer, he has received three National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships in Photography, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, and the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.
Hank Willis Thomas (b.1976, Plainfield, NJ) received a BFA in Photography and Africana Studies from NYU in 1998, as well as an MFA in Photography, and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2004. Thomas has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the world, and his work is in the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, among other public and private collections. His collaborative projects have been supported by the Tribeca Film Institute, Open Society Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and have been featured at the Sundance Film Festival.
Carmen Winant (b.1983, San Francisco, CA) received her MFA from California College of the Arts, where she studied with the photographer Larry Sultan. In 2010, she was a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Winant is a writer and visual artist who explores representations of women through collage, mixed media and installation. In August of 2018, Winant joined The Ohio State University Department of Art faculty as the first Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art. Winant has exhibited nationally, most recently as part of “Being: New Photography” at MoMA in 2018.
