Terttu Uibopuu continues the Fall 2020 Visiting Artist Lectures in Photography.

Hosted by Ian Kline, Photography MFA '22. Poster design by Nick Massarelli, Graphic Design MFA ‘21, and Ian Kline, Photography MFA '22.

This Visiting Artist lecture is free & open to the public. Join the virtual space using this link >

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Terttu Uibopuu continues the fall semester's Visiting Artist Lectures in Photography, sharing her experiences creating images that capture the essence of diverse personalities around the world, all while emitting a "soft mythical presence."

"The world is constantly more interesting than any mind, any imagination, here comes that statement...the world is stranger than fiction. But within this way of thinking about art making, here arises the paradox, it takes a specific person's mind filled with subjectivity and an awareness to understand, to question, to react to this forever interesting world and to validate and create from their existence and add a sparkle into the dark of this shared now.

So how does someone fencing in a gym become so monumentally heavy but so light, all in a singular gesture? So perverse. How do the ridges in this mountain become extra terrestrial when we know the water. We are torn between realities, maybe torn is too violent for the care that is felt in looking, in REALLY looking. We are dancing between realities in the eyes, the skin, the trees, the clouds, in the ink and god damn I want to dance right now.

Through this specific mind, this sparkle, a new world is constructed and this new world feels familiar. However something more felt than known. This tilted familiarity we are confronted with as viewers is informed by a past, histories traveling through time and light collapsing into fragments, into poems as spirit guides lend a hand to push us forward but not define our future. This specific past, the past for the reason I am writing this, is brought into light from an origin in the post-soviet Baltic country Estonia in 1984, followed by the migration to the United States in 2002 to dive into this absurd, beautiful, delusional, obsession with expression that is art making.

There is a soft mythical presence to Terttu’s photographs I felt when I first stumbled upon them on the screen after seeing a photograph of a sensual installation at Soloway pop up in my feed. From that, an aura formed in my head around the artist and the work, and I was so happy sitting in the space exploding with associations and disparate narratives that made sense within myself. But as curiosity keeps moving forward and you have to write a visiting artist lecture introduction biography you have to look into the specifics.

Terttu Uibopuu is a photographer, bookmaker and educator currently living in New York City. She was born in 1984 in Estonia and moved to the States in 2002. Terttu received her BFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago and her MFA in photography from Yale University in 2011 where she was also awarded the Alice Kimball Travelling Fellowship and the Tierney Fellowship. Since leaving Yale she has taught at the International Center of Photography, Wesleyan University, and the Borough of Manhattan Community College. In 2012 she participated in the AIM program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and in 2017 she was a workspace resident at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York; Nicole Klagsbrun, New York; Schneider Gallery, Chicago; Co-Prosperity Sphere, Chicago; and Society of Korean Photography, Seoul, Korea among others. In 2017 she had a solo exhibition titled Caught In A Looped Gesture at Soloway gallery in New York and in 2018 had a solo exhibition at University Galleries of Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois - yes the city is called normal - this exhibition featured twenty-five photographs taken throughout the United States and Estonia drawn from her project E.S.E. (East South East) and was accompanied by a hand-made artist book.

Ok hopefully I didn’t miss too much and I’m going to finally stop talking and am so excited to welcome and turn it over to Terttu."

This talk was hosted by, and the above bio was authored by, Ian Kline, Photography MFA '22.