Each committee participating in Women to Watch 2008 worked closely with the finest museum and gallery curators from its locality to put forward the names of five contemporary photographers for consideration. Lists were submitted to NMWA's juror, National Museum Of Women In The Arts Director Susan Fisher Sterling, at the committee leadership conference in 2006, during which each group gave a presentation. Of the 50 applicants, Sterling selected 11 artists for the 2008 exhibition. The works represent a wide range of styles, methods and themes in contemporary photography.

Women to Watch 2008 Artists

France: Valerie Belin (French, b. 1964) is represented by Untitled, which features the face and shoulders of an unclothed white female "mannequin," and Untitled, the male counterpart. Both works are part of Belin's New Faces (Portraits) series, 2006, created with models from Paris agencies. Though shot in color, Belin's models appear colorless, lifeless, and sexless. It is not clear whether the blank expressions and flattened features are images of real people or computer-generated avatars. Belin raises questions about contemporary identity by cutting away any frame of reference that would enable the viewer to convert the images into a story.

Illinois: In her Public Displays of Affection series, 2003, Tricia Moreau Sweeney (American, b. 1974) innovatively riffs on the tradition of street photography. Referencing both intimacy and aggression in her art, she photographs staged scenes of couples fighting in semi-urban neighborhoods and alleyways in wintertime. Literally stripped bare of all warmth, these gritty tableaux are metaphors for troubled family relationships. Their bleak everyday locales, bundled up figures, and confrontational behaviors offer insights into the emotional complexities of family life.

Mississippi: Marita Gootee (American, b. 1958) is one of Mississippi's most important midcareer photographers. She created the six impressionistic works in her Shifting Landscapes series, 1998–2005, using a pinhole camera, then hand tinting her prints with colored pencils and linseed oil. Made with techniques derived from the early days of photography, her works emphasize not just the beauty of nature but also the mutability of photographic perception. Gootee's images suggest an otherworldliness she describes as the "overlooked beauty of what wonder lies around us…the spiritual quality of the land."

Vermont: Combining performance with self-portraiture, Tarrah Krajnak (Peruvian, b. 1979) and Wilka Roig (Puerto Rican, b. 1973) use photography to critique the manner with which women have been—and continue to be—represented in photography and other visual media. Imitating stock poses but eschewing seductive or submissive gazes, the artist-models interrupt the normative cycle of women's desirability in service to the male gaze. The artists encourage the viewer to question the traditional presentation of women as powerless, mercurial, and defenseless.

New Mexico: The four photographs in Joan Myers's Western Power series, 1999, are panoramic images of power sources and generators throughout the American West. Myers (American, b. 1944) describes the power plant as a "necessary mediator between our desires and their realization, much as the cathedral was the intermediary between God and man in the Middle Ages." The series grew out of her incredulity over the extensive efforts given to developing nonrenewable resources contrasted with the minimal attention to renewable resources. Her images demonstrate how industrialization has permanently changed the world.

Spain: Paulina Parra's mixed-media pieces are vehicles for expressing intimate feelings about love, loss, and pain. Parra (Venezuelan, b. 1969) is fascinated by the cycles of life and the duality of blood: "Blood is associated with death and pain but also to life. Blood flows through our veins to keep us alive….The heart beholds our most basic contradictions as human beings—love-hate, life-death, joy-sadness." By impressing her photographs directly on aluminum, Parra creates abstract works that explore the heart literally and symbolically.

Massachusetts: Lissa Rivera's most recent body of work records in a deadpan style the communal areas of college fraternity and sorority houses in and around her native Boston. Looking at the complex relationship between these organizations and U.S. corporate and political life, her images are free of human presence. Instead, Rivera (American, b. 1984) concentrates on the symbols of power—trophies, paddles, and photographs of alumni—leaving the viewers to project their own experiences into the highly coded enclaves.

United Kingdom: Represented by Untitled (Blue) and Untitled (White), both 2006, Elisa Sighicelli (Italian, b. 1968) currently lives and works in London and Turin. The works are part of a series featuring large, lighted advertising billboards found in Shanghai, China. Sighicelli digitally removes the product logos and other promotional information, leaving only the abstract pattern of glowing lights. The works are exhibited in partially backlit lightboxes that offer an eerie yet familiar glow that simulates the images' original function.

Pennsylvania: Installation artist Zoe Strauss (American, b. 1970) creates photographs that record street life in her hometown environs of South Philadelphia: children doing flips on cast-out mattresses, storefront churches advertising salvation, and chainlink fences lined with cheap goods for sale. Through her one-person Philadelphia Public Art Project and her yearly Under I-95 show (her installation under the I-95 freeway), Strauss documents her surroundings and sells her photographs for $5 each. For gallery consumption she creates slide shows of these images. According to Strauss, each tells a story while participating in a larger narrative about the beauty and difficulty of everyday life.

Vancouver: Jin-me Yoon (South Korean, b. 1960) is represented by the video The Dreaming Collective Knows No History (U.S. Embassy to Japanese Embassy, Seoul), 2007, and a still from the video. By turning the vertical city of skyscrapers and bipedal humans onto a horizontal plane, Yoon alludes to the interrelationship between the built environment of the city and the human body. The smooth flows of progress and power as well as the frantic pace of production and consumption are interrupted in the video then arrested in the photographic still. -- www.nmwa.org