MP3, Vol. 2

This second installment of the Midwest Photographers Publication Project (MP3), also produced in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, presents the work of three emerging artists: Curtis Mann, John Opera and Stacia Yeapanis. In his series Modifications, Curtis Mann collects found photographs that depict conflicts in the Middle East and northern Africa. He then bleaches and scratches the surfaces of these images, removing information to tease new meanings unintended by his source material. John Opera investigates the more uncanny qualities of nature, referencing historical notions of the sublime in landscape and Modernist photography and moving between figuration and geometric abstraction. Stacia Yeapanis' keen attraction to varieties of entertainment and hobbies has led her to explore the simulated-reality computer game The Sims 2 on the one hand and the craft of embroidery on the other, as she stitches television-screen captures of characters in states of alarm and distress. This slipcased edition is an affordably priced and beautifully packaged introduction to three major talents of the new generation in American photography.

"At first glance, there appear to be few similarities among the works of emerging photographers John Opera, Curtis Mann and Stacia Yeapanis. Yet upon closer analysis, overlapping themes float to the surface. From the distressed surfaces of Mann's found photographs, abraded with bleach, to the push and pull of Opera's transcendental landscapes and abstractions to Yeapanis's graphic pieces that simulate mediated moments, all three artists achieve an intimate and hand-manipulated effect, exploring contrasts between the presence and erasure of objects or the real and the imagined." -- Emilie Sutherland --PDN Edu: The Magazine for Emerging Photographers and Photo Educators