SMoCA in the Community!

PHOTOS COURTESY OF BENASIROSE

SMoCA in the Community: Polaroid Project
OCT 1 6:00 - 10:00 PM

SMoCA is setting up a special booth at the PHX Park ‘N Swap for a participatory community photo project.

Visitors to SMoCA’s booth will make and take away Polaroid photographs in the spirit of Pedro Meyer’s vision for a “new paradigm for exhibiting photographs” and encouraging public exchange.

Park 'N Swap is located at 3801 E. Washington Street, Phoenix (at the southwest corner of 40th Street and Washington St.).

Entrance to PHX Park N Swap $2.
Polaroid Project FREE.

*CHECK OUT the article in the AZ Republic: http://www.azcentral.com/community/scottsdale/articles/2008/09/23/20080923sr-swap0924.html



ARTiculations: Pedro Meyer, Mexico’s Digital Pioneer
OCT 21 7:00 PM

Elizabeth Ferrer, director of visual arts at the BRIC Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, will discuss the unusual and vast international exhibition project, Pedro Meyer’s Heresies. She will give an overview of Pedro Meyer's massive database (which she and a team of fellow curators used to develop thematic video selections also included in the exhibition) and the broad reach of Meyer's work as a photographer, digital pioneer and contemporary cultural theorist. Stage 2 Theater. $5 members; $7 nonmembers. Call 480-994-ARTS [2787] for tickets.



Representation and Latin American Film
by David Foster, Ph.D.
NOV 13 6:30 PM

In this gallery talk, David William Foster, PhD, will explore the pretense of objectivity behind documentary traditions and the crisis of representation in Latin American filmmaking. Is all representation an ideological illusion? He will discuss artistic interventions that reinterpret the notion of the documentary, as it relates to film and to Pedro Meyer’s photography. Dr. Foster is Regents Professor of Spanish and Women and Gender Studies at ASU. In conjunction with Pedro Meyer’s Heresies. Meet in Museum lobby. Free.



My Phoenix: New Perspectives
NOV 7 6:00 PM -10:00 PM
Lo Nuestro Studio/Gallery
736 W Fillmore, PHX Az 85007

Grande Ave Arts DISTRICT

My Phoenix: New Perspectives is a collaborative project in conjunction with SMoCA’s, Pedro Meyer’s Heresies photography exhibition.

Metro Tech High Digital Imaging Students will work with the SMoCA team to “test the limits of truth, fiction and reality,” through their own photography, as Meyer did in his work. This project will culminate in a student-produced photography exhibitiont at Lo Nuestro Studio Gallery in downtown Phoenix. A free public opening reception will take place during Phoenix’s First Friday on November 7th beginning at 6:00 p.m.

About Pedro!

Pedro Meyer is one of the pioneers and most recognized representatives of contemporary photography. He was the founder and president of the Consejo Mexicano de Fotografía(Mexican Council of Photography) and organizer of the first three Latin American Photography Colloquiums. Besides his artistic photographic work, Pedro Meyer has been a teacher in various prestigious institutions, as well as the curator, editor, founder and director of the renowned photography website ZoneZero, which hosts the work of over a thousand photographers from all over the world, and is visited by more than 500,000 people each month. More than 5.5 million people visited ZoneZero in one year making it one of most visited sites for content on the web.

In 1991 he published the very first CD ROM in the world that combined images and sound titled “I Photograph to Remember. He is also the author of the books “Tiempos de América”American Times), “Espejo de Espinas” (Mirror of Thorns), “Los Cohetes duraron todo el día” (The Fireworks Lasted All Day). His book “Truths and Fictions: A journey of documentary photography to digital” edited by Aperture, was also made later into a CD ROM by Voyager in 1995. His latest book titled “The Real and the True” published by Peach Pitt Press came out in 2005.

Pedro Meyer has imparted more than a hundred lectures on the subject of photography and new technologies in important festivals, museums and academic institutions in Mexico, The United States, England, Germany, Argentina, Spain, Ecuador and Sweden amongst others. He has been a guest artist in the University of Colorado in Boulder, Centro de Estudios Fotográficos in Vigo, Spain and The Arizona Western Collage in Yuma, Arizona.

His work has been presented in more than 200 exhibitions in museums and galleries all over the world and is part of very important permanent collections that include: The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, The Musee National D'art Moderne Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, The International Center of Photography also in New York, George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, The California Museum of Photography, in Riverside, The Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, Casa de Las Américas, Havana, Cuba, Centro Studie e Archivo della Comunicazione dell’ Universitá of Parma, Italy, and Comuna di Anghiari, Palazzo Pretorio, Italy amongst others.

* the following information has been taken from pedromeyer.com

Heresies: The Project

"Pedro Meyer’s Heresies is a retrospective comprising four decades of groundbreaking work by one of the world’s most innovative photographers. The Heresies exhibit — opening simultaneously in 60 museums worldwide in October 2008 — will also create a revolutionary new paradigm for exhibiting photographs in museums.

Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer is as renowned for his powerful and provocative photographs as he is for his pioneering work with digital imaging. Meyer’s photographs consistently test the limits of truth, fiction and reality. With the advent of digital photography in the early 1990s, Meyer evolved from a documentary photographer who created so-called “straight photographs” into a digital-documentarian who often combines photographic elements from disparate times and places to arrive at a different or higher truth. Meyer’s oft- expressed contention that all photographs — digitally manipulated or not — are equally “true” and “untrue” has been labeled “heretical” in the orthodox documentary photography community. Hence the title Heresies.

Meyer’s personal innovations in the field of digital photography include creating the first CD- ROM to combine sound and images, creating the first digital prints ever made and in 1994, creating his renowned online photography forum, zonezero.com — the most-visited digital photography content site on the web.

In addition to these artistic and technical contributions, Meyer’s trailblazing work on behalf of Latin American photographers, beginning with his establishment of the Mexican Council of Photography in the late 1970s, effectively organized and elevated photography as an art form across an entire continent.

With Heresies, Meyer casts his visionary gaze toward the concept of museum-based photography exhibits. What are they now? What can they be in the future? In an era of financial constraint and basic redefinition of the museum’s role, Meyer’s new... and heretical... paradigm for photography exhibits facilitates:

• collaborative creativity between curator and artist
• worldwide networking amongst the 60 museums participating in the Heresies program
• enhanced research and collection-building capacity for museums, and
• compelling educational programs that appeal to the iPod generation "

*This excerpt was taken from the Heresies project website, http://www.pedromeyer.com/heresies/heresies.html

Welcome + Bienvenidos

SMoCA is honored to be one of 2 museum's in the West exhibiting Pedro Meyer's internationally acclaimed project "heresies."

Curated by Lara Taubman, "heresies" will be opening and on exhibit October 4, 2008 at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.