Aperture Conversations

Feminist Futures with Sara Knelman

Thursday, February 4

7:00 p.m. EDT

Watch a recording of the talk here. 

From the Dada movement to today, artists have deployed the visual collisions of collage to critique, challenge, provoke, and invent their own idyllic realms. In this conversation, writer Sara Knelman speaks with Alanna Fields, Felicity Hammond, and Lissa Rivera about the freeing, utopian nature of feminist collage.

In the Winter 2020 issue of Aperture magazine, “Utopia,” artists, photographers, and writers envision a world without prisons, document visionary architecture, honor queer space and creativity, and dream of liberty through spiritual self-expression. They show us that utopia is not a far-fetched scheme, or a “no place” (the literal meaning of the word utopia), but rather a way of reconsidering the everyday.

Sara Knelman is a curator and writer, and executive director of Two Rivers Gallery, Prince George, Canada. Previously, she worked as director of Corkin Gallery, Toronto; talks programmer at The Photographers’ Gallery, London; and curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Canada. Knelman recently contributed to the books A World History of Women Photographers (Textuel, 2020) and Recent Advancements: Jimmy Limit (Rodman Hall, 2020), and she writes about photography for 1000 Words, Aperture, Prefix Photo, and Source. She collects pictures of women reading and lives in Prince George, Canada. www.saraknelman.com Photo by Emma McIntyre

Alanna Fields (born in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, 1990) is a mixed-media artist, whose work investigates and challenges representations of Black queer identity and history through the lens of photography. Fields’s work has been featured in exhibitions at Felix Art Fair, Los Angeles; UNTITLED, ART Miami Beach; the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, Brooklyn; and Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, among other venues. Fields is a 2018 Gordon Parks Foundation Scholar, a 2020 Light Work Artist-in-Residence, and a 2020 Baxter St at CCNY Workspace Resident. She received her MFA in photography from Pratt Institute, and has given talks at Stanford University, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Parsons School of Design at The New School, and Syracuse University. Fields lives and works in New York City.

Felicity Hammond (born in Birmingham, UK, 1988) is an artist and educator based in London. She received an MA in Photography from Royal College of Art in 2014. Her expanded approach to photography has been widely recognised through awards such as British Journal of Photography’s International Photography Award and Foam Talent. Recent solo exhibitions include: Remains in Development (Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp – co commission with C/O Berlin, 2020) and World Capital (Arebyte, London, 2019). Recent public commissions include Surface Treatment (Cleveland Pools/The Edge, Bath 2019) and Post Production (Contact Photo Festival, Toronto 2018). Her artist book, Property was published by SPBH editions in 2019.

Lissa Rivera is an artist and curator based in New York and California. Rivera’s personal work focuses on the social history of photography and the evolution of identity, sexuality and gender in relationship to material culture. Selected press includes The New York Times, Artforum, and Harper’s Bazaar among many others. Public collections include Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Newport Art Museum; Danforth Museum of Art; Davis Museum at Wellesley College; and The Art Museum of Dickinson College.  As a curator, Rivera strives to include traditionally underrepresented voices regardless of formal education or exhibition history. Rivera’s exhibition, Leonor Fini: Theatre of Desire 1930-1990, was the first US Museum survey dedicated to Fini. Rivera has served as curator for Laia Abril: On Abortion; James Bidgood: Reveries; Mariette Pathy Allen: Rites of Passage; Canon: Juan Jose Barboza-Gubo & Andrew Mroczek; Night Fever: New York Disco, The Bill Bernstein Photographs; and served as co-curator of Punk Lust: Raw Provocation; and NSFW: Female Gaze; and producer of Known/Unknown: Private Obsession and Hidden Desire in Outsider Art.

 

Image: Alanna Fields, Untitled (Blue), 2019, from the series As We Were; Courtesy the artist

 

Programming for Aperture magazine’s “Utopia” issue is presented in partnership with London-based fashion brand JW Anderson.


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