This exhibition highlights works by 40 artists—all members of Houston Center for Photography—selected on an international scope from 190 submissions, for the institution’s 34th Annual Juried Membership Exhibition. The exhibited works demonstrate strength, criticality and diversity in the members’ artistic pursuits, and engage with a wide range of themes, from reinterpreting/revising personal or collective histories and memories, to documenting and commenting on changing environments, responding to the materiality and technology of photography as a medium, and constructing a utopian/dystopian space. Resisting against simply creating a beautiful photograph, in all of the works here the artists investigate the limits and potentials of photography, and, in many, they experiment, blurring boundaries between photography and other forms of art (e.g., performance, sculpture, and painting). In this process, they critique the status quo of today’s photographic art and visual culture, and demonstrate their prospective contribution to the further growth of contemporary art and photography.
Congratulations to all of the artists exhibited here, and, in particular, Petra Barth, Eli Durst, and Stacy Platt, winners of this year’s Beth Block Award.
Yasufumi Nakamori, Juror
Curator and Head, Department of Photography and New Media
The Minneapolis Institute of Art
