Associate Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Studies Andy Grundberg, Chair of Photography Muriel Hasbun, and visiting instructor and artist Pablo Ortiz Monasterio's proposal for a three-person panel, "Conversación: Dialogue at a Distance," was accepted for the Society for Photographic Education's National Conference in Baltimore, Maryland March 6-9, 2014.
Andy writes:
Collaborations usually take place in the same time and physical space, with artists working together toward an agreed-upon end. But what if the artists are thousands of miles apart and start out with only a glimmer of what might ensue? Muriel Hasbun of Washington, D.C., and Pablo Ortiz Monasterio of Mexico City, D.F., began exchanging photographs by email as a casual gesture of friendship, but the text-free conversation morphed into an intuitive, complexly structured dialogue about memory, meaning, and cultural distance. The artists relied on their own archives of work as source material for the exchange, reinterpreting in some cases pictures taken decades earlier.
The final form of this international, internet-based project, “Conversación,” was an exhibition shown at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, D.C., November 2011-February 2012. For this panel the artists will discuss their year-long process, what they discovered along the way, and the pleasures of sharing unexpected directions in their work. Andy Grundberg, who joined the project as writer of the exhibition essay, will contextualize their work and discuss his own conversation with the images once they were assembled.
Congratulations Andy, Muriel and Pablo!