FREE public talk: open to all
Saturday, December 4, 10am, Hawaii Standard time (3pm EST)
Zoom link below

Please join photographer Lydia Panas and David Ulrich, co-director of Pacific New Media Foundation, for a conversation about her work and her dynamic new book Sleeping Beauty. PNM is especially honored to host Lydia and feature her work. Lydia and David have a decades-long association dating back to The Art Institute of Boston (now Lesley University College of Art and Design) in the 1980’s.

Sleeping Beauty: Photographs by Lydia Panas, with text by Marina Chao, Maggie Jones, and Monae Mallory. MW Editions, 2021

Portraits of women and girls intertwined with the photographer’s gaze, in a rare subversion of photography’s power relations

This volume presents award-winning Pennsylvania-based photographer Lydia Panas’ (born 1958) much-praised series of mesmerizing color portraits of reclining women and girls. In an interesting reversal of roles, the artist’s and models’ gazes are intertwined, incorporating the viewer as participant in an often uncomfortable connection. Critics and curators have praised the work for Panas’ artistic and technical mastery, and all have noted and examined the powerfully affecting gaze of her subjects. Panas notes: “While my subjects do in actuality turn their gaze towards me, it’s as if at times I turn the camera onto myself, both in the present and back in time.” In Sleeping Beauty, her subjects lie down, a metaphor for the position girls and women have been placed in historically. But they look out with self-awareness, in a way that implies a lack of complicity.

In her text, Marina Chao writes about the evolution of Panas’ work over nearly 30 years. “Panas creates a collective portrait of psychological womanhood as it is embodied by herself and the sitters and is understood, or misunderstood, by those who view the work. The portraits in Sleeping Beauty are also a collective mirror, reflecting back our feelings towards women, our assumptions and expectations of them. The space of these photographs is more gathered in, protected and intimate, than in the artist’s previous bodies of work and has shifted from their idyllic, pastoral surroundings to being unmistakably Edenic. Panas’ women—Panas herself, all of us—are moving on, moving forward, and reclaiming the Garden.”

Zoom link: 
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https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5993781603

Meeting ID: 599 378 1603

Lydia Panas is a visual artist working in photography and video. Drawing on a combination of psychoanalysis and feminism, her work looks at identity and what lies below the surface, investigating questions of who we are and what we want to become. Exploring the roles of power and trust on both sides of the camera, she describes what it feels like to be a woman, a human, and the complex range of emotions we feel. Panas’ work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally. Her photographs are represented in public and private collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Palm Springs Art Museum, Allentown Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, Museum of Photographic Arts San Diego, Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, and the Sheldon Museum, among others. Two monographs of her earlier work have been published: Falling from Grace (Conveyor Arts, 2016) and The Mark of Abel (Kehrer Verlag, 2012), which was named a “best coffee table book” by the Daily Beast. For more information, visit: www.lydiapanas.com.