Penelope Umbrico

Recipient of the photography Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, Penelope Umbrico takes ubiquitous photographic instances and lays them up against each other, like sunsets on Flickr or broken TV sets on eBay (pictured) or the sculptural desk trajectories. She pulls these images from the internet, catalogues, auction sites and image aggregators that make up our visual commons. For some of these, the original setting of the single image was intended to make us want them but – like anything that is repeated enough till it’s utter nonsense – proliferation of these images makes their materialness immaterial, their uniqueness lost in the collective whole.