1275 Minnesota St / EUQINOMprojects

Opening reception: Saturday, May 6th | 6-8pm
Book signing + Artist walk-through: Wednesday, May 10th | 6-8pm 

EUQINOMprojects is pleased to present Surface Tension, a photographic series by Tabitha Soren, at Minnesota Street Project. Soren’s images, with their textured, painterly quality, juxtapose figure and ground, analogue and digital, tactile and immaterial, to speak to the contemporary condition of our digital age: the tension of existing between two worlds.

While the images first appear to be digital composites, they are in fact photographs of an iPad screen taken with an 8x10 large-format camera, with painterly marks made from finger grease residue left while browsing and swiping. By foregrounding marks that technology users normally ignore or try to erase, Soren shines light on the invisible traces of digital consumption and engagement. In doing so, she preserves a series of gestures, and in the spirit of Eadweard Muybridge and his movement studies, documents this relatively new physical language.

A broad selection of found images, their sources used as titles for each work, sit behind the marks, are all culled from the artist’s Google searches and personal communications. For example, a photo sent from the artist’s daughter hangs in visual conversation with a photo of the protests in Ferguson, sourced from a news website. This wide ranging conversation, in tandem with the layers of abstract marks, creates a sense of simultaneous distance and intimacy, underscoring the mediated experience of image engagement itself.

Tabitha Soren left a successful career in television in 1999 to start another one as a photographer. She received a BA in Journalism and Politics from New York University and later studied photography at Stanford University and at The California College of the Arts. Her work is included in public collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Oakland Museum of California; Transformer Station, Cleveland, Ohio; Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco; New Orleans Museum of Art; Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indiana; and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans.

Soren just released her monograph “Fantasy Life” with Aperture Foundation. The best-selling hardcover book follows baseball players from the minor leagues to the major leagues. Fifteen years in the making, “Fantasy Life” consists of richly textured photographic stories, taken both on and off the field. It includes commentaries by each of the players and memorabilia from their lives, along with a short story from Dave Eggers. A book signing and walk-through with the artist will take place at the EUQINOMProjects exhibition on Wednesday, May 10, 2017 from 6-8pm (presented in partnership with Aperture Foundation and The California Sunday Magazine.)

The book signing on May 10th is presented in partnership with Aperture and The California Sunday Magazine.