Photography Exhibition: Florida Museum of Photographic Arts - Andrea Modica: Flights of the Soul

The Florida Museum of Photographic Arts holds some of the best photographic exhibitions in the southern United States. Their current exhibition, Andrea Modica: Flights of the Soul looks like an amazing exhibition of Ms. Modica’s work. While I haven’t seen it yet, having seen her photographic work at the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago, I’m certain this exhibition at the FMPA will be an exciting example of a terrific contemporary US artist.

Ms. Modica has been the recipient of both a Guggenheim Arts Fellowship and a Fulbright-Hays Research Grant. Her work has been on exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the George Eastman House in Rochester, and The National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.

The exhibition runs through January 10, 2010

For more than ten years, Andrea Modica has been photographing a group of children in rural upstate New York. It is here, through a young girl named Barbara and her extended family, that Modica has created an amazing body of her work. Transforming reality into fantasy, Modica creates narratives that seem to have no beginning or end, yet present endless scenarios.

In a fictitious town called Treadwell, Barbara and her friends pose for the photographer, who creates images with an 8 x 10" view camera.

In “Flights of the Soul,” Modica looks closely at the passage between body and spirit, between life and death.  She catches moments between an intake of breath and the flatness of a depleted body; between the silence of a child gazing up at a light bulb and the sight of a small boy playing dead.  Using her 8 x 10-inch view camera, making platinum-palladium contact prints, she is able to create images which reveal the subtle difference of shadows and reflections in the photographs which bring such depth to her work.

I’ll be in Florida next month and will definitely take in this exhibition in Tampa. If you’re in the area, I suggest you do too.

As I travel, I love seeing the work of other photographers as I hope you do. If you know of a new photographic exhibition which you think the Blog should publicize, please contact me.