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Not If But When
Exhibit Opening February 26Posted: February 08, 2007
Artist's Reception 5:30 - 7:30 PM Thursday, March 1
Exhibit Closing March 30
Brian Ulrich is an artist photographer (b. 1971 in Northport, NY) living in Chicago, IL.
His work has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Photography; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary art, San Diego; the Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco; the Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; the Sean Kelly Gallery, NY; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, NY; the Festival d’Arles, Arles, France; the Contemporary American Photography Festival, Mannheim, Germany; the Armory Show [2006]; and ArtBasel, Miami, [2006].
You can see his work in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Martin Margulies Collection, and the LaSalle Bank Photography Collection.
His first monograph, Copia was published in 2006 by Aperture as part of the MP3: Midwest Photographers Project. Brian is a frequent contributor to Adbusters Magazine, and includes the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, Wired, Fortune, Seed, Spin, and The Salvation Army in his editorial portfolio. Other recent publications featuring his work include the exhibition catalogue for Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist’s Eye (MCA Chicago), Harper’s Magazine, the Photoeye Booklist, the Chicago Tribune Magazine, Leica World Magazine, Photo District News, Time Out Chicago, Fotopozytyw Magazine (Poland), and Mouvement Magazine (France).
Brian is represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco, and Julie Saul Gallery in New York.
He teaches photography, web design, and visual literacy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Columbia College.
Profile
Brian Ulrich
Not If But When
http://www.notifbutwhen.com/
In 2001 citizens were encouraged to take to the malls to boost the U.S. economy through shopping, thereby equating consumerism with patriotism. The Copia project, a direct response to that advice, is a long-term photographic examination of the pecularities and complexities of the consumer-dominated culture in which we live. Through large scale photographs taken within both the big-box retail stores and the thrift shops that house our recycled goods, Copia explores not only the everyday activities of shopping, but the economic, cultural, social, and political implications of commercialism and the roles we play in self-destruction, over-consumption, and as targets of marketing and advertising. By scrutinizing these rituals and their environments, I hope that viewers will evaluate the increasing complexities of the modern world and their own role within it.
Copia is composed of several chapters, currently Retail, Thrift, and Backrooms. These further document notions of social class, excess, and corporate ideologies. By combining photographs taken candidly with a medium-format film camera outfitted with a waist-level viewfinder, and studied compositions taken with a large format camera in thrift shops, I can capture lost excitement and overwhelmed, subsumed moments. The large-scale prints allow the viewer to stop and notice with a distanced perspective familiar places and things. Over time these images take on new meaning, ones anthropological and historical of an affluent society at the dawn of the 21st century. What we buy and what we use up becomes the evidence of our experience of this time.
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