Social Medium

September 15 - November 10, 2018

Curated by Wave Pool Executive Director, Calcagno Cullen, Social Medium was a participating exhibition in the Fotofocus Biennial 2018.

Artists have a long history of making socially engaged work, acting as instigators for community redevelopment, and for being able to build communication and collaboration within communities through creative means. Social Medium exhibits these community-led archives—with photography in particular used to frame the subject and narratives of these neighborhood stories, yet never forgetting that there is a fine line between celebrating marginalized populations and exploiting them. To find the balance between using a camera to tell a story vs. creating one, then, there has been a surge of photographic experiments that blur the lines between photographer and subject, artist and community. This exhibition displays the results of several of these collaborative approaches to photography, as well as see a community-based shared photography project to fruition with our own community.

As part of the exhibition, Wave Pool hosted Picture People: Collaborative Tactics in Photography Workshop with Eliza Gregory and Gemma Rose-Turnbull September 22, 2-5pm and a Panel Discussion moderated by Curator Calcagno Cullen October 14, 2-3:30pm

Featured Artists included Eliza Gregory, Gemma-Rose Turnbull, Rebecca Hackemann, Mark Strandquist, Jason Lazarus, Chris Johnson, Hank Willis Thomas, Bayete Ross Smith, Kamal Sinclair, Natalie Mancino and Jacqueline Wood