JOANNE DUGAN

ARTIST BIO:

Joanne Dugan is a process-based photographer and visual artist. She works exclusively with traditional analog photographic materials to explore photography as a three-dimensional, physical medium. Informed by Buddhist principles and daily mindfulness practices, she uses historic vintage photo equipment, intricate hand-cutting techniques and chemical alterations to create experimental abstract, one-of-a-kind collages that explore the intersections between photography and painting.

Working with the 200-year-old practice of slowly exposing light directly onto chemically-coated papers, Dugan reinterprets two of analog photography’s most notable printing techniques—Silver Gelatin and Cyanotype—to explore the effects of light as a mystical, contemplative subject. Connecting the slowness of historic photography processes to mindfulness meditation practices, her typologies of camera-less Photograms and Luminograms are created in a traditional wet darkroom, or exposed outside in open air.

Her work has been exhibited in the United States, UK, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and Japan and is part of many private collections. Publications include the New York Times T Magazine, the Harvard Review, Unseen and Photograph magazines.  She is a recent recipient of residencies at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) and the Abbott Watts Residency for Photography and was a finalist for the Meijberg Art prize at Unseen Amsterdam. Dugan’s work has been published in seven books combining text and image, including two monographs. She lives in Harlem and works on Union Square.