TABITHA SOREN: SURFACE TENSION

Join MCAM in celebrating the opening of Tabitha Soren: Surface Tension.

Featuring photographs by Bay Area artist Tabitha Soren, Surface Tension explores the intersection of everyday technology with culture, politics, and human contact. Using an 8×10 large-format camera, Soren shoots iPad screens under raking light to reveal the tactile trail we leave behind. The images beneath are a compendium of private and public experiences, from a young child blowing a kiss goodnight to her mother, to the protests that followed the fatal 2014 shooting by police of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The images she chooses are drawn from web searches, text messages, social media content, and personal pictures, raising questions about authenticity and exploring the difficulty and lack of desire to distinguish between reality and fiction. Soren’s images serve as a poignant meditation on the role of digital devices in society and offer a reminder of the traces, both physical and digital, that we leave behind when using them.

Surface Tension is Soren’s first solo museum exhibition in the Bay Area and includes three new installations created specifically for the Mills College Art Museum.

On view from September 18 – December 12, 2021

THE ARTIST
Tabitha Soren (b.1967, San Antonio, TX) is a Bay Area-based artist and Peabody Award-winning journalist, known for her work as an MTV news correspondent and on-air producer. In 1999, Soren began a fellowship at Stanford University where she shifted her visual arts practice from film to still photography. Her photographs are in many private and public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the George Eastman Museum of Photography, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, and San Francisco’s Pier 24.