Susan Lipper. Grapevine. 1988–1992
Thursday, April 27, 2017, 6:00 PM - Sunday, June 18, 2017
The Grapevine series by Susan Lipper takes its name from Grapevine Branch, West Virginia, USA, a small community in which Lipper took up intermittent residency in the late 1980s and early 90s. With time, she was accepted as an inside member of this closed community and developed intimate relationships with its residents, whom she interviewed and then photographed with a medium-format camera.
Although Lipper’s images seem to be constructed within the established vocabulary of documentary photography, she broke from this tradition by granting her sitters the theatrical license to perform as actors—as versions of themselves that may or may not have been true. After printing the resulting images, Lipper reviewed them with her sitters so they could refine or alter their poses.
This collaborative process paradoxically fulfills a traditional documentary function by throwing the gender and class roles enacted in small-town America into greater relief and asks viewers to recall the images of rural American communities we hold in our collective visual memory. In Lipper’s photographs, each role, whether inhabited or performed, reveals itself to be artifice or fantasy as much as a means of personal expression.
In this way, Grapevine enacts a double manifestation of self, picturing both Lipper’s own psychic imagination—her creation and exploration of a fictional Eden removed from the reach of empty consumerism—and her subjects’ keen self-awareness in their posturing.
Susan Lipper is a New York based artist. She received her MFA from Yale University in 1983. Among the monographs on her work are Bed and Breakfast (2000), trip (1999) and GRAPEVINE (1994). Lipper is included, amongst other places, in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She is the recipient of numerous awards, most recently the 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Exhibition in the main programme of the Krakow Photomonth Festival 2017.
MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow
ul. Lipowa 4
The combination of post-industrial atmosphere with a modern and functional glass and concrete structure provides a perfect framework for the presentation of important phenomena in the art of the last five decades.
A memory of the former production halls of the enamelware factory (known from Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List) melds here with a modern and functional structure of glass and concrete, providing a perfect setting for the presentation of contemporary art. MOCAK has its own, regularly expanded collection of art (both Polish and foreign) from the last five decades, and its development can be traced in the successive variations of the permanent exhibition. It has been divided into a number of sections: conceptualism, video, sculpture, and objects. It is also the venue for numerous temporary exhibitions, including a large annual problematic exhibition confronting selected questions in contemporary public life with the artists’ outlook (the presentations made so far have focused among others on history, sport, economics, crime, gender, and medicine in art). Moreover, MOCAK regularly hosts exhibitions of Kraków Photo Month. The museum runs its own library with a book collection devoted to contemporary art and humanities, runs educational activities, and manages and implements research and publication projects.
Tickets: normal PLN 20, concessions PLN 10, family PLN 43, admission free to permanent exhibitions on Thursday
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