Artspeak
Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Paul Mpagi Sepuya (1982, San Bernardino, CA) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He studied photography and imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in New York, Los Angeles, Basel, Sydney, Toronto, Paris, Berlin and Hamburg. His work has been featured and reviewed in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Interview, Capricious, V, Paper, and BUTT, among other publications. Recent exhibitions include Evidence of Accumulation, at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Studio Work at Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis, and awards include the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency (2009-2010) and Artist-in-Residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock (2010), and Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2010-2011).
Exhibitions
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PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA
January 26–March 2, 2013
Artspeak will host the debut Canadian solo exhibition of recent work by Paul Mpagi Sepuya, titled Studio Work.
Studio Work is Sepuya’s most recent body of work, developed during his 2011-2012 artist residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The project is both a volume of photographs—formal portraits, loose snapshots, still-lifes and details of the his studio space—and an installation composed of those materials accumulated in the studio, tracing the artist’s occupation and photo-making from the beginning to the end of the residency. The work explores how the studio environment, as site of creation, editing, and accumulation, affects and frames portraiture and the performance of portraiture.
Sepuya made the self-portraits by inviting friends in to spend time and have their portraits made, in formal set-ups as well as snapshots. Each portrait is constructed amidst the unfinished editing process of those works that preceded it, and in reference to those other images that populate the studio. Sepuya states, “My studio was private, but not a closed environment. Rather, it was a stage that I inhabited and opened to those around me.”
Please join us at the opening reception of Studio Work, Friday January 25th. All are invited to a public conversation between artist and curator, to take place Saturday 26th, at 2PM.
The Canadian presentation of Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s Studio Work is curated by J.J. Kegan McFadden and co-produced by Artspeak and PLATFORM Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts (Winnipeg).
Talks & Events
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PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA, J.J. KEGAN MCFADDEN
January 26, 2013Artist and curator in conversation.