February 18 – March 22, 2003

J.D. Beltran
Jim Campbell
Paul Kaiser/Merce Cunningham
Joan Logue
Julia Scher
the Surveillance Camera Players

ID/ENTITY features a range of media art projects exploring how artistic representations of "self" change with new technological advantages. Taking cues from the history of photography, these investigations look back at traditional portraiture and forward to the future, postulating about the shifting relationship between representation and identity and tracing the effects of new technologies on the genre—formally and with regard to cultural shifts in interpretation.

ID/ENTITY was originally organized by MIT / Judith Donath and curated by Christina Yang, director of media arts at The Kitchen, New York. Generous support has been provided by the Beall Center for Art & Technology; University of California, Irvine; and the Exploratorium. ID/Entity is supported by Corporate Media Systems.

May 13 – June 14, 2003

Heather Ackroyd/Dan Harvey
Diane Althoff
Jean-Philippe Baert
Marco Breuer
Binh Danh
Kate Farrall
Ann Hamilton
Carlos Motta
Roger Newton
Cynthia Young

Agitate challenges conventional photography through works that reexamine, rebuild, or dispense entirely with the traditional photographic apparatus. The majority of the artists in this exhibit eschew the camera altogether, while other artists concern themselves with inventing their own photographic lenses, devices, and printing surfaces to further their exploration of the medium. Still others incorporate a performative aspect into the production of their images. The after-effects of the artists’ purposeful interruption of traditional photographic processes and equipment alter our perception of how the medium can be manipulated to creative ends.

Agitate was supported by the California Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Hotel Triton, and San Francisco Cinematheque.

Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts
Spring/Summer 2003, Vol. 30, No. 1
Agitate: Negotiating the Photographic Process

August 5 - September 6, 2003

Max Aguilera-Hellweg
Mark Kessell
Olivia Parker
Rosamond Purcell
Arne Svenson
William Wegman

The Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, one of the last surviving medical museums of the nineteenth century, houses a renowned collection of natural anatomical specimens and models of medical curiosities. The specimens were originally used as medical teaching devices, but the museum has developed a new audience, due largely to the interest generated by the museum's once little-known and now coveted photography calendars, art directed and produced for nearly a decade by guest curator Laura Lindgren, an independent curator, designer, and publisher based in New York. This exhibition, organized by CATE, features work by artists drawn to photograph the shocking beauty of the museum's unusual specimens.

October 28 – November 26, 2003

Katharina Bosse
Laura Carton
Elinor Carucci
Vince Cianni
Charles Cohen
Elena Dorfman
Bill Durgin
Laura Letinsky
Naglaa Walker

Locating Intimacy explores the space(s) of desire, engaging viewers in contemplation of spectatorship, exhibitionism, and fantasy. The work included lies on a continuum from empty to occupied spaces, ranging from empty "fantasy rooms" to abandoned sites of sexual encounter, from recontextualized pornographic stills to dislocating corporeal projections. Revealed in the work is the topography of sexual desire and the explicit construction of intimate zones. Intimacy itself is revealed to be both a diverse construction - sometimes unearthed by the camera, at other times created by it – as well as a spatialized relationship between two or more subjects, be they on or off, before or behind the camera.

Camerawork: A Journal of Photographic Arts
Fall/Winter 2003, Vol. 30, No. 2
Locating Intimacy: The Space Between