Penelope Umbrico, appropriation artist

I am reading a wonderful book of essays by Teju Cole called Known and Strange Things. He's smart and his interests are wide ranging. Currently I'm in a section titled "Seeing Things," about film, photography, and more. He's mentioning so many artists I have never heard of, and his descriptions send me immediately to Google so I can see the works in question.

One of those artists, Penelope Umbrico, is featured in a color illustration insert, and I really enjoyed the representative image, an excerpt of a larger installation called 541,795 Suns from Flickr, from 2006:

Umbrico's MO is to search the web for a subject—in the case of the above, it was "the most photographed subject," which turned out to be sunsets, and from there she isolated the suns in the sunset photos she found on the photo sharing website Flickr. 

Here are some other collages she's created in a similar manner:

This one is called Range (1850–2012) of Aperture Masters of Photography (2012), which she describes here. It's mountains as shot by "masters of photography," variously manipulated through apps to create and mimic the mistakes of analog film photography.

Sun/Screen/Scan (2018), described here: in a nutshell, disassembled computer monitors, laptops, tablets, and phones.

 

 

Everyone’s Photos Any License (654 of 1,146,034 Full Moons on Flickr, November 2015) (2015), described here.

136 Mini Film Cameras in the Smithsonian Institution History of Photography Collection With Old Style Photoshop Filter (2012), with more information (include a close-up of the various assemblages) here.

 

A collection of "previously owned" ceramic cat figurines advertised on eBay (2015–ongoing), described here. 

 

And finally, circling back to sunsets:

 

 

Titled Sunset Portraits from 33,755,447 Sunset Pictures on Flickr on 08/16/17 (2017).

There are many more subjects and collages, all detailed at length on Umbrico's website. 

I appreciate the obsessiveness of Umbrico's searches and the artistry of her representations. I'm not quite so obsessive myself, but I can imagine getting lost in such a project.