Exhibits & Events

Space 1026 is pleased to present Commencement: Groundwork, one of the first steps in an ongoing and developing exhibition by photographer Zoe Strauss.

Strauss is known internationally for her vision of the world highlighting the constants and the changes that reside in the same place as shown through her photography. Strauss’ photographs challenge the authority of the image through repetition, context shift, and historical reframing. While rooted in reality, her images assert themselves as subjective pictures of the world as we feel it as well as how we see it, and cast doubts and propose questions about the veracity of the documentary image.

This exhibit is an introduction, a prologue if you will, of work that points to specific concerns about place and space and makes us ask basic questions about our perception of what is reality. The world we are living in together, at this very moment, is always a balance between here and there. The question Strauss poses is are we seeing, evaluating, and judging things in their entirety or are we the parable of the blind men and the elephant? What are the limits and objectivity of documentary photography? As we stand on the ground, this exhibit asks us to recognize that as it is above, so it is below.

Commencement began as an examination of what it is to be a person living in America among the ever increasing anxieties and critical situations around the globe. It was initially conceived in 2016 as the foundation for a Guggenheim Fellowship Award, which Strauss received the following year. With the cataclysmic upheaval in society and politics since then her concerns over civic and environmental crises became less conceptual and more of an immediate reality.

Since then, Strauss turned her focus towards developing the 3212 Think Tank. Named for the Doomsday Clock’s prediction of our proximity to the end of civilization as we have known it (three minutes to midnight). The 3212 Think Tank is a classroom study space for researching, learning, and discussing the impact of the ebb and flow of our society and culture. It operates within a public high school serving as a laboratory for students to critically think about the world around them.

As a way to illustrate and acknowledge the evolution of our lives, culture, and the world in which we all live and co-exist in, some of the photographs in the exhibit will change during the course of the show. Which is to say that like life, some things enter and some pass away, and other things arise to take their place.

Zoe Strauss was born in Philadelphia, PA in 1970. She began taking photographs after receiving a camera for her 30th birthday. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, The Bruce Silverstein Gallery, NYC, DePauw University, Greencastle Indiana, SFMOMA, San Francisco, The International Center for Photography, NYC  just to name a few. She has been a part of group exhibitions at the Indianapolis Installation Festival, Indianapolis, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, NL, the Brighton Photo Biennial, Brighton, UK, the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Philadelphia, PPOW Gallery, NYC and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Strauss has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the Tiffany Foundation Grant, the United States Arts Fellowship and more.

She currently acts as mentor to upper lever public high school students at the 3212 Think Tank at Science Leadership Academy at Beeber in Philadelphia.