Photography into Sculpture: an homage and an update
curated by L. Mikelle Standbridge
OPENING, October 5th, 3 PM
October 19, 2025 - February 22, 2026
Casa Regis - Center for Culture and Contemporary Art proudly hosts the exhibition, "Photography into Sculpture: an homage and an update", featuring 11 international artists. It is both a direct homage to the historic 1970 exhibition at MOMA and a look at where photography as sculpture stands today.
Peter C. Bunnell curated a ground breaking exhibition entitled "Photography into Sculpture" for the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970, receiving luke warm if not hostile reviews. By the 1980s, Bunnell himself was convinced the experiment of photography as sculpture - that is, photographically formed images used in a sculptural or fully dimensional manner - hadn't really continued to develop. Maybe with a slower take off speed than what he expected, the current art movement indicates the opposite. Besides the fact that the original exhibition has been restaged multiple times with rave reviews, Mary Statzer in 2016 published interviews with the participants of the original exhibition along with other current experts in the field, bringing the discussion up to date ("The Photographic Object 1970", University of California Press). It is in this publication where renown Los Angeles curator Rebecca Morse, in her chapter on "The evolving photographic object", accurately states "What becomes evident is that contemporary artists have abandoned medium specificity for hybridity in ever-increasing numbers". Well known artists such as Christian Boltanski and Annette Messager come to mind as the most iconic.
This continued intrigue since the 2000s in the historical MOMA show is in direct proportion to the fascination of the subject today. Casa Regis with this current exhibition offers artists, arriving from various European countries, the US, and of course Italy, a place where it is possible to continue the exploration of experimental terrain and while each artist has very individual content, the common uniting factor lies in the very specific research of materials and/or display methods.
Several artists work directly with the cotton paper photograph, where there is an intervention on the print, by hand, such as Diane Meyer's cross-stitching. She intervenes on landscapes, where the Berlin Wall once stood, referencing the psychological impact that still remains. L. Mikelle Standbridge scratches, stitches, waxes and dyes her prints, which are then formed into 3D shapes, in relation to themes around bodies. Dawn Surratt uses subtle almost imperceptible techniques of transfer prints onto hemp paper, paper clay, or silk, hand-worked with cold wax and pigments, all delicately housed in minute flag books, reminiscent of loss and change.
Other artists have either abandoned the paper print or are working over or beyond it. In the case of Silvia Gaffurini, through an interdisciplinary approach, combines photographic images printed on tracing paper with embossed drawings generated by AI, giving shape to a future that reality has ceased to imagine. Henrik Miklos Andersen and Roberta Toscano print on "Backlight" - a positive transparency - and in the case of Henrik, composite family photos are backlit with LED lights and in the case of Roberta, celestial, out of body images are illuminated from medical light boxes. Roberta's second piece, actually a performance, entails exploding soap forms in the microwave that resemble her photographs of clouds. Fabiola Ubani aptly conveys a space suspended between presence and absence as she prints large-scale scenes of ethereal bed-landscapes on gauze and glass. Also creating an all-inclusive atmosphere with installations, Olga Caldas prints on cloth, to dress the domestic setting with tablecloth, floor rug, and curtains. In addition, her dark table setting hosts photographs printed on ceramic dinner plates. Oona Hyland, equally drawn to the loaded language of clay vessels - materiality, territory, and ideology - applies cameraless photographic abstractions onto ceramic jugs.
Villiam Miklos Andersen, skilled in the use of technology, uses CT scans to generate shapes for his futuristic frames, cut from neon acrylic glass and for the central image, laser cut etchings on mirrored acrylic. His high-tech image of a strawberry speaks to augmented fruits and machine-generated access to food distribution. Bennie Flores Ansell is a different kind of installation artist altogether, in the sense that she arrives at photography indirectly through auxiliary or behind-the-scene artifacts, such as positive film transparencies, variable contrast filters, 35mm orthographic film reels, and dichroic films. Her sculptures and light projections playfully repurpose these historic analogical finds as they reference the act of making a photograph.
The diversity in style and theme is evident, as each artist pursues a very personalized approach to the role of photography in a multi-media or sculptural setting. What is undeniable is that the incorporation of the photographic medium to express contemporary themes will only continue to grow and will undoubtedly stay in stride with trade products and technological developments.
L. Mikelle Standbridge