The 2023 Paula Riff Award Winner: Paula McCartney

In early February 2021, we misplaced a shiny mild and singular artist, the incomparable Paula Riff. She left behind her daughter, together with an expansive group of mates, artists, and admirers, all grappling with the profound absence of her presence and imaginative and prescient. In 2021, in honor of Paula, Lenscratch and the Center of Photographic Art established The Paula Riff Award as a approach to rejoice and lengthen her enduring legacy. Paula was an innovator who pushed images past its typical boundaries, utilizing cameraless methods and historic processes to create luminous objects of extraordinary magnificence and tactility. The award acknowledges artists who equally problem the bounds of the medium by work that foregrounds the artist’s hand—whether or not by different photographic processes, slicing, stitching, weaving, sculptural intervention, or different acts of fabric transformation.

The Center of Photographic Art has simply opened the exhibition, Changing the Narrative
The First 5 Years of Paula Riff Award Winners, that includes work by Aimee Beaubien, Minwoo Lee, Paula McCartney, Marni Myers, and Katie Shapiro. The exhibition shall be on view by July twenty sixth, 2026.

This week, we revisit the work of those 5 earlier recipients, culminating on Friday with the announcement of the 2026 winner.

Today we function the work of Paula McCartney. Her work was chosen by gallerist Douglas Marshall, bringing collectively images, ceramics, and sculpture to discover the fragile interaction between presence and absence, mild and shadow, object and picture. Drawing on the visible language of black-and-white analog images, McCartney creates works during which hand-built ceramic kinds converse with pictures of their shadows, collapsing distinctions between constructive and destructive house, previous and current. Through these fastidiously orchestrated alignments, McCartney transforms easy geometric kinds into meditations on connection, stability, and time. Rooted in each formal abstraction and the artist’s expertise of motherhood, the sequence displays on relationships which can be without delay tangible and ephemeral, revealing how mild, materials, and reminiscence can maintain profound emotional resonance.

My apply combines images and ceramics to think about ways in which mild prompts objects and environments, highlights the load of a shadow and dialogs with my psychological experiences of being a mom. Photographs that signify a report of previous accrued expertise are juxtaposed with the rapid presence of ceramic sculpture.

In/Direct Alignments pairs pictures and ceramics to discover the interconnectedness of sunshine and shadow, presence and absence. It makes use of the language of black and white analog images with its destructive and constructive, minimal palette and powerful distinction.

The wall works juxtapose a white unglazed ceramic sculpture with {a photograph} of the sculpture’s shadow. The shadow within the {photograph} expands the type of the sculpture and holds as a lot presence because the sculpture itself. In the desk works, a black ceramic sculpture sits on high of {a photograph} positioned into dialog with a picture of momentary areas of daylight from my studio home windows; at occasions it nearly feels as if the sunshine is passing by the ceramic onto the paper, creating its personal impression.

In structural and visible dialog with photograms and modernist geometric abstractions, these summary works additionally specific my concrete experiences as a mom, satisfying a steady craving for stability and connection. The pictures report a fastidiously composed, fleeting second of pure mild and shadow. The ceramic sculptures are intentionally positioned to align and join, cementing a peaceable existence and clear dialog that I continuously yearn for.

Remodel expresses the real looking – somewhat than idealistic – aspect of motherhood. In a set of 9 pictures, every {photograph} data a reconstruction created from all of the items of a damaged ceramic grid. Once documented, the unique items are piled up and used once more, assembled and reassembled, creating extra advanced and attention-grabbing buildings. I work with what I’ve, to create not orderly however animated outcomes, that typically jut out of the body and attain outward and onward like my son.

The 4 sculptural works in Remodel embrace ceramic buildings that nod to the form of a house. As with the reconstructions within the grid of 9 pictures, the traces of the partitions don’t at all times align and there’s a visible precariousness to the buildings that provides character. In distinction to the structurally inflexible, machine fabricated grids of 1960-70s Conceptualism my grids are unfastened, playful and proof the hand and labor of constructing. Each ceramic sculpture is embraced by a folded mounted {photograph} that data dramatic shadows of the sculpture created from a number of angles. The shadows function reminiscence and proof of my experiences by the years. – Paula McCartney

Paula McCartney makes pictures, books and ceramics that illustrate her collaborations with the pure world and think about ways in which mild prompts environments and dialogs along with her psychological experiences of being a mom. She has acquired fellowships in each Artist Books and Photography from the McKnight Foundation and grants from Women’s Studio Workshop, the Aaron Siskind Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board. McCartney was the 2023 recipient of the Paula Riff Award by the Center for Creative Photography

McCartney’s pictures have been exhibited nationally at venues together with the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  Her books are included within the artist guide collections of the Walker Art Center, Museum of Modern Art, Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University, Getty Research Institute, amongst many others. She has two printed monographs Bird Watching and A Field Guide to Snow and Ice. McCartney holds an MFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute and a certificates in Creative Studies from the International Center for Photography, NYC.

Instagram: @paula_mccartney