ZOE LEONARD
ANALOGUE
curated by:
Roxana Marcoci, Drew Sawyer, Nancy Newhall
The Museum of Modern Art
MoMA
11 West 53 Street - New York
27/4/2015 - 30/8/2015
The
Museum of Modern Art presents Zoe Leonard: Analogue —a landmark photographic
installation, which was acquired by the Museum in 2013— in the Donald B. and
Catherine C. Marron Atrium from June 27 to August 30, 2015. In 412 color and
black-and- white photographs, Analogue (1998–2009) documents the changing
landscape of 20th-century urban life as seen in vanishing mom-and-pop stores
with decaying facades and quirky hand- written signs and the simultaneous
emergence of secondary global markets like the rag trade. Zoe Leonard: Analogue
is organized by Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator, with Drew Sawyer, Beaumont and
Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography.
Exploring the
two-fold tradition of documentary and conceptual photography, Leonard’s project
is positioned within the tradition of the grand visual archives that extend from
Eugène Atget’s Paris and Walker Evans’s America, to Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles and
Martha Rosler’s Bowery. The artist began photographing shops in her neighborhood
on New York’s Lower East Side in the late 1990s. Over the course of a decade,
the project grew to include hundreds of photographs, displayed in serial grids
organized into 25 chapters, that follow the global circulation of recycled
merchandise—used T-shirts, old-fashioned shoes, discarded Coke advertisements,
and old technology like Kodak camera equipment—to far-flung places in Eastern
Europe, Africa, Cuba, and Mexico.
Roxana Marcoci says, “Analogue is an
urgent document and poetic allegory of globalization and the push for
technological innovation, revealing the movement of goods and the homogenization
of diverse geographical locations in the 21st century.”
The disappearing
storefronts and neglected products are echoed in the obsolete technology the
artist used to reproduce them: a vintage 1940s Rolleiflex camera, along with the
gelatin silver, chromogenic, and dye-transfer printing processes. Leonard
underscores the analog process by not cropping the black frame of the negative
from the final 11-by-11” prints, reminding the viewer of the materiality of
celluloid film, a format becoming increasingly obsolete in an age of digital
technology. The embrace of photography as an analog medium is reinforced in the
work's recurrent references to Kodak, photo studios, and graffiti. Analogue is a
testament to the loss of both locally owned shops and straight photography.
To date, Analogue has been presented in various formats since it premiered
at the Wexner Center for the Arts and Documenta 12 in 2007: as a set of 40
dye-transfer prints, as a book, and as a room-size installation. MoMA is the
only institution outside of Europe to own the final installation, completed in
2009 and presented here for the first time.
Zoe Leonard was born in 1961
in Liberty, New York, and lives and works in New York. She has exhibited
internationally since the late 1980s and has recently been the subject of solo
exhibitions at Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas; Dia:Beacon, New York;
Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, Madrid; and the
Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio. Her work was included in the 1993,
1997, and 2014 Whitney Biennials and in Documenta 9 (1992) and Documenta 12
(2007).
