Toni Pepe
We are so very pleased to feature Toni Pepe. Toni is an artist and educator living and working in the Boston area. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally including the Center for Photography at Woodstock and Spilt Milk Gallery in Scotland. She was a finalist for the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, a Critical Mass top 50, and a Review Santa Fe 100. Her work is in the permanent collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Danforth Art Museum, Candela Books & Gallery and the Magenta Foundation. A well regarded practitioner and teacher, we are happy to feature her works and highlight her unique process. - Steven J. Duede, Artist
Mothercraft
By Jessica Roscio, Ph.D. Director and Curator, Danforth Art Museum .
Toni Pepe’s photographs are among some of the first works I saw at the Danforth when I arrived in 2011. The piece on view was from the Gesture of Tradition and I was immediately struck by how her compositions occupied space and utilized objects; I literally could not look away. Toni’s work has always been personal, reflective of thoughts and experiences applicable to a particular stage in her life. When I first encountered her photographs, I was captivated with the ways she explored the confines of domestic space and women’s historic role within it, a topic that has always been personal for me. Visually and materially, Toni’s work has made a dramatic shift in recent years, but conceptually women’s labor and the way in which the body occupies space is still a running thread.
Mothercraft is a series of works recontextualizing archival press photographs dating from throughout the twentieth century. She collected the images on eBay and at flea markets after they were discarded, and has merged them in a way that the notes written on the back of the images over years of use appear layered on top of the photograph. One should note that they were not originally produced to be what we would call a fine art photograph. Their original use was as press photographs, images produced to illustrate a story. As one can tell from the notes scrawled on the images, the stories they illustrated addressed social and political issues directly related to women’s lives including birth, childcare, and reproductive rights. If reading closely, one will find that the tone of the text is often in sharp contrast to the image; filled with stereotypes and often a critical indictment of a woman’s fitness to mother. Each image and the accompanying text are a product of their time, and should be viewed in that context. However, while we could choose to view them merely as historical artifacts, we would be amiss not to also recognize the alarming extent to which they mirror our current social and political landscape. Toni’s work is exquisitely crafted and incredibly timely, merging photographic history, ways of seeing, and critical contemporary concerns.
Mothercraft
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.
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.
Toni Pepe is a Boston-based 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 and an MLA in visual culture from Boston University. Pepe has exhibited both nationally and internationally including the Center for Photography at Woodstock and Spilt Milk Gallery in Scotland. She was a finalist for the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, a Critical Mass top 50, and a Review Santa Fe 100, an SPE Imagemaker, and an Artist Trust Grant awardee. Her work is in the permanent collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Danforth Art Museum, Candela Books & Gallery, the Magenta Foundation, as well as many private collections. A solo exhibition of her work is now on view at the Danforth Art Museum through January 29, 2023 Visit Toni
Toni Pepe