Toni Pepe
Mothercraft
Apr 4 - 27, 2024
Mothercraft is an ongoing body of work that uses press photographs culled from flea markets and eBay to reconsider 20th-century depictions of mothers in the US media. Typed and handwritten text, along with date stamps, creased edges, and stains, layer the backs of the photographs. These images are time capsules, showing us the event pictured and the frame through which they were received. The photographs I have collected illustrate movement, both socially and politically, as records of the shifting identity of motherhood and women’s liberation, but also durationally as physical images that were held, touched, and eventually abandoned. What becomes of a history never intended to be kept but is found because of our ever-connected digital lives?
Each photograph in Mothercraft is backlit as I rephotograph it, and the resulting image simultaneously reveals both the front and back of the print. With a sharp focus on the text, the image can fall further into obscurity, blurred, and layered with captions and marks. The fragmented captions often slip past their descriptive roles into the more dogmatic territory and reflect the dynamic push and pull between the personal and the political. They offer information ranging from the objective, such as age and location, to the more partial and idiosyncratic details tied to tradition and duty. These images provide a glimpse into the unstable nature of truth and the complex relationship between image and word.
Toni Pepe (American, b.1981, she/her/hers) is a visual artist whose creative practice is grounded in photographic processes, memory, storytelling, and identity, as seen through a feminist lens. Found photographs from both private and public collections play a crucial role in her practice. Pepe often uses vernacular or press imagery to explore alternative notions of an archive as well as different modes for collecting and preserving knowledge. Pepe enjoys finding the possibilities and limitations of photography – how it can make us both remember and forget, make something feel entirely present and absent, and show us something beyond the frame.
She views the medium of photography as a tool amongst many that she uses in the studio. Occasionally, the camera is the answer to her creative question, but oftentimes, she is using other techniques including mold-making, assemblage, embroidery, performance, and laser etching. As Pepe weaves these varied processes into her practice, her focus is always turned toward how these materials relate to photography in an expanded sense.
Pepe is currently chair and assistant professor of photography at Boston University where she has helped to build and now launch a new MFA in Print Media and Photography. She received her MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology (2008) and an MLA in visual culture from Boston University (2011). Pepe has exhibited both nationally and internationally including a current exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and an upcoming solo exhibition at Blue Sky Gallery. She was a finalist for the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, a Critical Mass top 50, a Review Santa Fe 100, an SPE Imagemaker, an Artist Trust Grant awardee, and a 2024 MacDowell Fellow. Her work is in the permanent collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Boston Athenaeum, the Danforth Art Museum, Candela Books & Gallery, the Magenta Foundation, as well as many private collections.