interviews September 21, 2021

Sara Cwynar

Sara Cwynar’s opus Glass Life (2021) ambitiously navigates contemporary image culture with her signature embrace of “high” and “low” source material. To watch this six-channel video is to tumble headlong through sheaves of saturated hand-clipped images interlaced with hundreds of files pulled from deep within the artist’s hard drives. Her narrator reminds us: “In the glass life, everything can be used. It is all material.” Fingers swipe through Instagram. Hands hold open history books. Kim Kardashian appears while we hear about tulips in seventeenth-century Holland. Cwynar pins a stock photo of

interviews July 27, 2021

Elise Rasmussen

Elise Rasmussen’s “Year Without a Summer” took her to multiple continents and into the creation of one of Western literature’s best-known books—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The artist’s research-based project joins personal experience, cultural history, and scientific discovery into a surprising, layered narrative. Speaking from Los Angeles, Rasmussen shares how she weaves disparate artistic and ecological threads together with a perspective afforded by the Covid-19 pandemic. “Year Without a Summer” will be on view at Toronto’s G44 Centre for Contemporary Photography from July 21 to August

print September 2018

Barbara Moore

I REGARD PETER'S ARCHIVE as a lifelong photo-essay. He came out of the generation of photographers influenced by Life magazine and his idol was W. Eugene Smith, with whom he studied in Smith’s final workshop. We met in 1960 and married in ’61, beginning our joint commitment to the thrilling avant-garde activities that were taking place. Judson was just one experience in this whole new world, which would eventually include Happenings, Fluxus, multimedia and intermedia. He and a handful of other photographers like Robert McElroy did this on their own time and at their own expense, simply because

Chandra Glick