Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman
Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman collaborate on photographic projects that address the confluence of history, myth and popular culture. Their subject matter spans their gendered experience from adolescence to aging and expands into critiques of the social landscape. They employ staged photography, studio constructions, documentary, alternative processes and artists’ books in their practice.
Their work has been exhibited in the US and internationally and is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, H2 Contempory Museum/Germany, Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro/Brazil, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Walker Art Center, and Worcester Art Museum. Their artists' books are in the collections of the Yale Center for British Art, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Joan Flasch Artists Book Collection, and Bainbridge Island Arts Museum among others.
In addition to their shared photographic practice, they are contributing editors to the photographic journal Lenscratch. They maintain studios in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Chicago, Illinois.
Artist Statement
We live in turbulent times, straining against the institutions of gender and power. Dialogues with Michelangelo looks at and through time to illuminate the present. Merging Michelangelo's hulking figures with contemporary portraits, temporal, historical, and gender-based constraints dissolve.
Michelangelo’s figures from the Sistine Chapel expressed divinity, justifying political authority in the Renaissance. We assume his poses, mirror the gestures, merge with and then break free to reimagine embodied knowledge. We conjure the dynamics of change in these alignments and collisions.
Release Date: July 14,2023
Over years of collaboration, our images have become a third voice in the creative conversation— an amalgam of our sensibilities and approaches.
While experimenting with ways to effectively juxtapose our photographs with Michelangelo’s figures, the Photoshop eraser tool cut a random path through the images. This unexpected action led us to a strategy that integrated the figures, physically revealing and altering histories. We mimicked Michelangelo’s reductive sculptural technique, carving into the past, creating ruptures between time, form, and content.
Ignudo, 2018
The Creation, 2018