New feature on ACP Blog

For those of you who don't know I'm a founding board of trustees for the Austin Center for Photography and also the ACP blog editor. I'm very excited to announce a new feature to our blog. I recently interviewed the collaborative team of Benjamin Drummond and Sara Steele and their on going project, Facing Climate Change.

To see the entire interview please check out the ACP blog.

I'm always looking for new features as well as blog contributors from experts in the field of photography including: professors, curators, artists, editorial and commercial photographers etc. Please contact me at sarahsudhoff@gmail.com regarding writing for the blog.

Rx

I am pleased to announce my first international exhibition, Rx, opens this Saturday, April 18th at IPS (In Plain Site) Gallerie in Montreal.

I wish I could afford to attend since its a three person show and meet the other two artists but that's the life of an artist. Constant sacrifice and disappointment.

I'm hoping to attract an international audience for my work. It always seems that European artists are much more in line with my aesthetic than most of my American peers.

A little about the show:

IPS is pleased to present Rx, featuring works by Chantal Gervais, Cindy Stelmackowich and Sarah Sudhoff.

April 18 – May 23, 2009
Vernissage -Saturday, April 18 3 p.m.
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Once the body has been deemed "ill", what was personal necessarily becomes public, beginning with the fact of the illness itself, which must be shared with medical professionals and others, and continuing with the invasive scrutiny of medical testing and the possible indignities of intervention.

The three artists whose photographs are featured in Rx work to control the representation of the self within the medical context, a context which has so often functioned to strip patients, particularly women, of agency. In constructing collages from MRI scans of her own body, including a re-gendered, technologically contemporary Vitruvian, Chantal Gervais willingly offers up what is ordinarily personal, interior and unseen, to the gaze of the viewer. The digital collages of Cindy Stelmackowich bring together lithographs that illustrated 19th-century anatomical atlases and illustrations of shipwrecks and other disasters from journals of the same era. In these re-colourized images, the internal torment the study of medicine may repress is returned to the patient, as cavities opened up for examination are made to reveal the panic and struggle within. Sarah Sudhoff began to produce self-portraits, films and performances in hospitals, morgues, medical museums and offices after undergoing surgery for cervical cancer in 2004. Her work focuses on the emotional as well as physical impact of illness, and includes images of the vulnerable body faced with the intractability of medical machinery, and of the residue of treatment on the flesh, and the sad beauty of medical waste.

Chantal Gervais is the recipient of the 2002 Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography. She received an M.A. in Art and Media Practice from the University of Westminister in London, U.K., and teaches photography and media at the University of Ottawa.

Cindy Stelmackowich’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibits in both Canada and the U.S. She teaches art history at Carleton University, and her writings have appeared in numerous journals and publications.

Sarah Sudhoff, a Texas-based photographer who has exhibited internationally, is a founding board member for the Austin Center for Photography in Austin, Texas and was recently included in Hysteria: Past Yet Present at Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey.

Capsule Art Review

A recent review in the Houston Press by Troy Schulze.

"Sarah Sudhoff — Repository" San Antonio-based photographer Sarah Sudhoff's first solo show scores for its bravery in depicting something as emotionally loaded as cancer treatment with bold austerity and subtle humor. The artist underwent surgery for cervical cancer in 2004, survived it and began examining medical environments through photography and video. Included are nicely saturated color photos of sample cups, bloody gauze, uninhabited examining rooms and tissue samples, along with large-scale, elegantly composed self-portraits in varying examination poses. One, Exam 2, in which Sudhoff sits upright on an exam table dressed in a plaid smock and bright green stockings, her feet resting in the stirrups, references the portrait series for Matthew Barney's overtly masculine Cremaster films, but from a feminine perspective. Sudhoff extracts herself from the photo's accompanying video — in which she passes time going through drawers and medical tools (she eventually administers her own pap smear and reads The New Yorker) — to pose for a picture. In another video, she bathes in a stainless steel basin. The clinical and stark nature of the work sustains an earthbound, taut tension that suggests stifled emotion ready to explode. Sudhoff is keeping it together while ugly, bloody reality lurks in the hospital's various repositories. Through April 17. Art League Houston, 1953 Montrose, 713-523-9530. — TS