Barbara Ciurej & Lindsay Lochman

Collaborative Projects

ARTISTS STATEMENT:

Narratives of femininity fascinate us — from domestic mythologies to the imprint of history and popular culture in shaping how we see ourselves. We examine and comment on the consequences of these processes through our photographic projects.

Although we begin with our personal experiences, the collaborative process enables us to search beyond the personal and find what is elemental to the human condition.

Our projects investigate where perfection is constrained by pragmatism, romance is blindsided by reality and another history is revealed.

BARBARA CIUREJ is a Chicago-based photographer and graphic designer. She has a BS in Visual Communications from the Institute of Design+Illinois Institute of Technology. Ever looking to the art historical past to invoke order and harmony, her search for narratives to explain her plight has fueled 30+ years of making pictures.

LINDSAY LOCHMAN is a Milwaukee-based photographer and lecturer at the University of Wisconsin /Milwaukee. She received her MS in Visual Communications at the Institute of Design+Illinois Institute of Technology. Inspired by the intersection of science and history, her quest to organize her natural world is marked by hyperbole, cynicism and the unconscious.

OUR COLLABORATIVE PROCESS:

We began collaborating while students at the Institute of Design in Chicago in the late 1970's. We were asking the same questions about finding our place in the world and using photography to examine those questions. On a practical level, working with a collaborator provides critique, a willing model, a road trip companion, an assistant, an editor. On a conceptual level, it challenges the notion of the primacy of the individual artist’s vision, the artist/model relationship, and ownership of the final work. Collaboration demands moving beyond personal stories and into the realm of collective experience. It has been the core of our practice and mirrors the fluid and mutable ways of storytelling traditions.

Depending on the project, we shoot together or separately and when necessary, model. Each body of work evolves through research and debate, editing and compromise. To bridge the distance between two cities, we rely on virtual communication, our online notebooks as well as studio practice.

Over the years, we have been fortunate to be part of communities where the exchange of ideas that lead to collective action fostered our own process: Artemisia Gallery, The Dinner Party Project in Chicago and Ragdale Foundation.

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ONLINE INTERVIEW

Recent Projects
watch me grow
natural history
ponder food as love
all things are always changing

Archive
mythology : landscape : architecture

Notebooks

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