Shutter Hub member Lydia Panas is a visual artist working with photography and video. All her work is made in the fields, the forests, and the studio of her seventy-acre farm in Pennsylvania. The connection she feels to this land and her family is the foundation of her work.
Panas’ work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally at venues including Artists Space (New York), National Portrait Gallery (London), Philips Collections (Washington D.C.) and Zendai Museum of Art (Shanghai). Her photographs are represented in public and private collections and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and Hyperallergic, among other publications. 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.
Panas has degrees from Boston College, School of Visual Arts, and New York University/International Center of Photography. The recipient of a Whitney Museum Independent Study Fellowship and a CFEVA Fellowship, she has been an Artist-in-Residence at MASS MoCA, Banff Centre for the Arts, and a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.
Her third monograph, “Sleeping Beauty” draws on psychoanalysis and feminism, to explore issues of power, vulnerability, and trust through portraits of women and girls intertwined with the photographer’s gaze, in a subversion of photography’s power relations.
http://www.lydiapanas.com/
In an interesting reversal of roles, my gaze and that of the models’ are intertwined, incorporating the viewer as a participant in an often uncomfortable connection. 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. My subjects lie down, a metaphor for the position women have been placed in historically. But they look out with self-awareness, in a way that implies a lack of complicity.
“Sleeping Beauty” (MW Editions, 2021), with texts by Marina Chao (Curator), Maggie Jones (New York Times Magazine), and Monae Mallory (Poet) was released by MW Editions in December 2021
For exhibitions, speaking engagements, and commissions please contact the artist.
To find out more about Lydia’s work, see her website here and follow her on Instagram.
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