Amy Adler’s transdisciplinary practice combines drawing, photography, and computer-driven processes to create unique photographic prints that disentangle photography’s traditional relationship to creativity, mechanical reproducibility, and the photographer/sitter, subject/object hierarchy. Throughout the 1990s, her “rephotographic” process involved making drawings based on photographs, photographing the drawings, manipulating the photographs on a computer, and printing the manipulated images on glossy paper in individual frames. The eleven works in Focus Series: Amy Adler all use this technique. Most were created between 1996 and 1997, with the exception of After Sherrie Levine (1994), the first major work in Adler’s oeuvre. This piece explicitly “appropriates” Levine’s earlier practice of appropriation, reproducing an Edward Weston image in a drawn, photographic print. Also featured in the exhibition were several series obliquely exploring the theme of self-portraiture, including What Happened to Amy? (1996) and Once in Love with Amy (1997). Both comprised stylized—and thus distorted—images of the young artist that broadly examined gender construction and childhood memory.
Focus Series: Amy Adler was part of the museum’s Focus Series (1992–1998), which was dedicated to presentations of distinct bodies of work by artists working in all media and featured a roster of distinguished local and international artists.