Colleen Plumb

Colleen Plumb p r o j e c t s Animals Are Outside Today 1996-2011 Towards the Sky Again 1997-2011 How the Sky and Water Attach at the End of the Sea 2001-present Beginnings 1995-1999 Inhabited 2014-2019 Thirty Times a Minute 2009-2019 Path Infinitum 2016-2017 Invisible Visible 2019-2020 Surveilling Snow Lily 2016-2021 videos objects books + limited editions cv / bio news installations contact	RECENT / UPCOMING: 2021 Fine Print and Book Signing at the Museum of Contemporary Photography with Colleen Plumb, Sonja Thomsen, Andrea Wilmsen, and Jeffrey Wolin. With Fine Print Program artists Farah Salem and Cecil McDonald and Skylark Editions. Museum of Contemporary Photography 6pm, December 8, 2021 600 S. Michigan Ave. Chicago, IL mocp.org -- Natural Transcendence, June 16-Nov. 7, 2021, curated by Rhonda Mitrani Oolite Arts, 928 Lincoln Road, Miami, FL --- *ecoartpace* book and exhibition: Embodied Forest, edited by Patricia Watts and curated by Lilian Fraiji Warp and Weft (still), video and sound, 14 min, 2021 --- Thirty Times a Minute, Radius Books, 2020 --- Installation: Surveilling Snow Lily at RomanSusan, Chicago, February 1–28, 2021 highlighted as "Must See" in ARTFORUM -- Installation: Invisible Visible at the Riverside Art Center, January 9–February 22, 2021 --- Thirty Times a Minute reviews, interviews and 2020 book lists: Book review by Radhika Subramaniam in Minding Nature Journal, Fall 2020, Vol 13, No. 3: Interview with Mark Molloy on New Books Network: --- Radio Interview with Laurent Levy's The Other Animals, WWDBAM Philadelphia, September 25, 2020 To listen: The Other Animals --- Webinar with Nonhuman Rights Project: to view recording: ---- Museum of Contemporary Photography: *What Does Democracy Look Like?* October 1–December 23, 2020 Leading up to the 2020 presidential election, the MoCP has invited seven faculty members from various departments at Columbia College Chicago to mine the MoCP’s permanent collection of 16,000 objects. Each curator will interpret the museum’s collection to consider what democracy means to them, and how photographic images record and shape our understanding of current and historical events. Guest curators include: Melanie Chambliss, PhD, Assistant Professor, Humanities, History, and Social Sciences; Joshua A. Fisher, PhD, Assistant Professor of Immersive Media, Interactive Arts and Media; Joan Giroux, Professor and Associate Chair, Art and Art History; Ames Hawkins, PhD, Associate Provost for Faculty Research and Development & Professor of English and Creative Writing; Raquel L. Monroe PhD, Director, Academic Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion & Associate Professor of Dance; Onur Öztürk, PhD, Assistant Professor of Art History, Art and Art History; Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin, Associate Professor of Journalism Bird on Stairs, 2004, from the series Animals Are Outside Today, included in: What Does Democracy Look Like? --- 2020 Culture and Animal Foundation Grantee for video project: Surveilling Snow Lily Colleen Plumb received a grant for “Surveilling Snow Lily,” a video installation project created from daily webcam screen recordings of a zoo-captive polar bear. The project reveals 4 years of Snow Lily’s incessant pacing. As the seasons change, each day she paces, alone. This work confronts a system of cruelty, passed as normal for generations, and asks viewers to truly see. She writes: To draw attention to the outdatedness and horror of the reality of the lives of captive animals, in order to tip the balance where people will not allow animals to be held captive for display under any premise. There is so much to be learned from observing Snow Lily pacing, cutting a path through the stage upon which she lives striking the exact same tracks with her paws each day for years. I want to use my video recordings of Snow Lily to create work that cuts through the stages we humans have built around ourselves to sooth ourselves and sterilize the realities of mortality and our own animal-ness. I want this work to show people what they do not (or will not) see and thereby serve as a catalyst for greater empathy and connection. This work is about the passage of time, questions what is willfully ignored vs. mindfully attended, endurance, absence, and the relentlessness of human's impact on the planet. During the fall of 2020, I stitch together, day by day, the past 4 years' recordings of Snow Lily pacing (and referencing the time period of the current administration). I project the growing video upon my front windows, relentlessly injecting evidence into my neighborhood. I wonder how long it will take for someone to knock on my door with any inquiry about the display... (Work In Progress -- final piece to be 4 channel installation with sound) –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Photography + _____, collaborations at Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, July 10-September 4, 2020 *Invisible Visible* formed through conversation between Colleen Plumb, an artist, and Katherine Kassouf Cummings, a writer; between images and words; between the individual and society. Expressed through photography, sculpture, video, and writing, this collaboration invites an examination of our relationship with the invisible that exists all around us. A projected image slowly breathes, appearing and disappearing: a color photograph of a raw wing bone from a bird, a chicken. This photograph “breathes” on a plaster-cast sculpture of a chicken wing. The photograph moves our eyes beneath the surface of the wing, into the interior, uplifting what’s invisible. Flanking the wing are chalk white bones cast from a wing bone. This delicate line of bones mirrors the physical experience of workers in a slaughterhouse, standing in compact rows. As the photograph bone breathes, we are invited to join the artist in an act of witnessing the chickens and the workers, together subjected to the suffering created by our industrial food system. Alongside the bones hangs a newsprint poster, bound into a pad affixed to the wall, with writings attending to the question of what makes the invisible visible. The writer describes a practice of attention, witness, and vision for relating with, and welcoming into view, the invisible. The reader traverses through stories that lead to the interior, beyond the visible and back through imagining. Prints can be torn from the wall, and viewers of this work are invited to absorb the writings—to take the stories with them—and carry the practice out into the world. – CP + KC –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Solo Exhibition through March 14, 2020: Colleen Plumb: Thirty Times a Minute at McCormick Gallery, Chicago ----- Exhibition January-March, 2020: McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Ontario * CONFERENCE Postponed due to Covid-19 ------- Public video projection of Thirty Times a Minute, with the Nonhuman Rights Project*, in Worcester, Massachusetts: February 2, 2019. Rally to protest Commerford Elephants with Change.org -------- Radio Interview: Live, on Wednesday, December 5, 9:10 am CST on NPR program in Tampa: "Talking Animals with Duncan Strauss" ------- Art Miami 2018, with McCormick Gallery, Booth 312, December 4-9, 2018 ------ RomanSusan and Ralph Arnold Gallery winter exhibition One Thing Leads to Another, December-Jan 2018 with outdoor projection at Devon and Sheridan intersection, 5-8 pm on Saturday, December 15, 2018, Chicago ------ Public Lecture and Thirty Times a Minute* video projections, Museum of Art Fort Collins and Colorado State University, August 17-20, 2018, with the Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO ------- Panelist, Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Conference, Toronto, Nov 2018 ------- Speaker, PAWS Captive Wildlife Conference, Los Angeles, and projections in Joshua Tree, Nov 2018 ----- Expo Chicago with McCormick Gallery, Navy Pier Chicago, September 2018 ------ Center for Photography at Woodstock, Awards & Benefit Auction, September 29, 2018, Kingston, NY ----- Lecture, Faculty Showcase Columbia College Chicago, Displacement: Public Video Projections and Spectatorship, May 1, 2018 ----- Speaker, Free the Elephants International Conference and Film Festival, Portland, Oregon, April 2018 ----- Psychology Today, Animals, Exploitation, and Art: The Work of Colleen Plumb, interview by Marc Bekoff, Jan 2018 ----- Lit Hub, Can an Artist Help Captive Elephants Win Legal Personhood? by Julia Cooke, November, 2017 ----- Targeted at Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, July 14 - September 1, 2017 ----- Infinite Games 50/50: curated by John Preus, organized by Rhona Hoffman Gallery at Open House Contemporary, Sept. 2017 - March 2018. Installation and video project: A collaboration by Roosevelt Burrell and Colleen Plumb ----- The Village Voice by Julia Cooke, featuring Path Infinitum at AIPAD, New York, April 5, 2017 ----- Feature Shoot, Shedding Light on the Plight of Captive Animals, by Sara Rosen, April 2017 ----- The Photography Show presented by AIPAD, Special Exhibition video installation, March 29-April 2, 2017