Rebekah Modrak

Rebekah Modrak is an American artist, author, and educator, born in 1971, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,

Rebekah Modrak
Born1971 (age 49–50)
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
NationalityAmerican
EducationMFA
Alma materSyracuse University
Notable work
Reframing Photography, 2011

She studied painting and photography at the NYSCC New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, in Alfred, NY and subsequently received an MFA at Syracuse University in Photography. She was a visiting artist on the faculty at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, before joining the full-time faculty at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, where she taught as Associate Professor of Photography until 2003 when she joined the faculty at the University of Michigan School of Art & Design. Rebekah Modrak's work has been exhibited at The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh Incident Report and the Sculpture Center in Cleveland.

She is currently a Professor at the University of Michigan Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design.

Early Work

Rebekah Modrak's work as a visual artist involves a struggle between the expected uses of a particular technology or history and her desire to employ that knowledge or system in unintended ways that support the messier dynamics of life. Modrak's original experiments in photography led her to question how the one-point perspective of "reality through a viewfinder" presumes to represent our experience of sight. This work, incorporating photographic images applied to three-dimensional forms, ranges from a series of over life-sized figures to portrait busts. The photographic "skin" in combination with the soft three-dimensional structure it was applied to creates complex portraits of individuals, revealing empathetic character traits through sculptural position, while employing photography's descriptive potential through compound images that document the minutiae of a given sitter with the hyper detail seen through the lens as it captures not only facial expression, but visceral specifics of hair texture and skin quality. As Modrak manipulated photographs to the will of the three-dimensional creatures, she recognized a lapse between this approach to media and the available texts about photography studio practice. In 2011, Modrak published, Reframing Photography, a book that redefines photography (theory, history, and technique) as a more expansive practice utilized by various types of artists, some who do not necessarily define themselves as photographers.

Critical Commerce

Modrak's recent studio work explores interests in shared concerns between art and commerce – each involving questions of labor, production, and distribution. These projects include ReMade Co and critical essays on the subjects of commerce, identity, and the misappropriation of blue collar labor. These projects incorporate social media as central agents of both the content and diffusion of the work, situating this practice at the intersection of culture jamming, and critical design.

#exstrange, co-curated with Maria Laura Ghidini, was a live exhibition project that used the online marketplace eBay as a site of curatorial operation, artistic production and cultural exchange; a project that operated within the geographical boundaries enabled by the commercial platform the exhibition presented a series of artworks-as-auctions that artists and designers created for eBay by using the entire listing as material constituting the artwork—descriptive text, images, pricing, and categories. The categories (such as Business & Industry, Collectibles, Consumer Electronics, Health & Beauty, Real Estate, and Warranty Services) also became a tool to reach particular and diverse communities of interest beyond physical and socio-cultural barriers.

102 artworks-as-auctions were created during #exstrange, and 91 artists, designers, collectives, researchers, and also students participated in the project, and the project received critical attention from the US to Italy to India. Artists, designers, critics and other contributors include: Mark Dery, Rob Walker, Abishek Hazra, Tara Kelton, IOCOSE, Ted Purves + Suzanne Cockerill, John D. Freyer, Matt Kenyon, Sophia Brueckner.

ReMade Co., which appears via its website, Facebook and Twitter pages as an "artisanal plunger" company, takes the branding of physical labor and blue collar work as lifestyle aesthetic as its subject, and, in the process, critiques tropes used by luxury brands to market tools, work wear and heritage brands to affluent urban dwellers under the guise of authenticity such as the urban woodsman. In their commercial drive, these luxury brands use images of work and labor for commercial profit. Using side by side comparisons, ReMade draws attention to the rhetoric and associations surrounding the luxury tool (in this instance, a plunger.) ReMade Co. appeared as a real storefront in Hudson, NY at Incident Report, on Warren Street, a street in a town where many of the working class identities previously visible have been displaced by luxury brands and recent NYC transplants.

Modrak's recent work explores interests in shared concerns between art and commerce – each involving questions of labor, production and distribution. Her artworks on eBay offer recreations of historic photographs, each incorporating an implausible garment as the main event. Original Fluxus stretchy pants mentioned in the post Stolen Ebayaday presented a pair of stretchy pants that (Modrak proposed) had been worn by Yoko Ono during her Cut Piece, by VALIE EXPORT in her street gestures, and by the members of Hi Red Center during their street cleaning event. Original Vito Acconci 04:30, December 21, 2011 (UTC) parasol with photographs adds an ornamental parasol to five seminal Vito Acconci performances.[1]

In ebayaday , Modrak along with Zack Denfeld, and Aaron Ahuvia (Professor, University of Michigan-Dearborn, School of Business) curated a month-long art exhibition featuring site-specific work by twenty-five artists, the first curated exhibition of artwork imbedded within eBay.com that uses eBay as a gallery with which to present an exhibition of artwork, instead of simply displaying and selling them.[2]

Ebayaday featured artists such as William Pope.L and Found Magazine editor/publisher Davy Rothbart.

Reframing Photography

Published in 2010 by Routledge, Reframing Photography,[3] written by Rebekah Modrak with Bill Anthes, is a pioneering book in the history of photography for its efforts to bridge technical and theoretical concerns in such a broad, all encompassing way.[4]

Bibliography

Reframing Photography, with Bill Anthes (2010) Routledge, ISBN 0-415-77920-0

References
  1. "A&D Profile: Rebekah Modrak". Art-design.umich.edu. March 13, 2011. Retrieved December 21, 2011.
  2. Provenzano, Frank "eBayaday: Curators transform Web auction site into art gallery" (article) The University Record January 4, 2007
  3. Modrak, Rebekah (November 23, 2010). "Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice (Paperback)". Routledge. Retrieved December 21, 2011.
  4. Jan (December 1, 2010). "Leonardo Reviews Home". Leonardo.info. Retrieved December 21, 2011.
  • Upcoming. Rebekah Modrak and Marialaura Ghidini, “Labor, Net Art, and the Online Market,” Media Art and Art Market, edited by Alessio Chierico, Digicult Editions, 2017.
  • Upcoming. Rebekah Modrak, “Best Made Re Made: Critical Interventions in the Online Marketplace,” Chapter in progress, The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design, edited by Chris Brisbin and Myra Thiessen, Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2017.
  • Rebekah Modrak, “Learning to Talk Like an Urban Woodsman: An Artistic Intervention,” Consumption Markets & Culture (Oxford, Routledge). Vol. 18, No. 6, September 2015, 539-558. ISSN 1025-3866 (Print) 1477-223X. DOI: 10.1080/10253866.2015.1052968. Double-blind peer review process.
  • Rebekah Modrak, “Bougie Crap: Art, Design, and Gentrification,” Infinite Mile, Issue 14, February 2015.

Presented as part of the Infinite mile series on gentrification, this article considers “bougie crap” as consumables that evidence wealth, power and discriminating taste under the pretense of an evolved palette, a demand for higher quality and the development of a social conscience. This paper examines the “partnership” between Shinola and the College for Creative Studies and the ethics and effects of this collaboration on design, education and gentrification.

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