Janet Sternburg Presents LIMBUS at USC’s Fisher Museum

Janet Sternburg, Lantern, 2011, printed 2018, pigment based color print (original medium: iPhone 4, chromogenic color print) 74 x 48 in.

This fall, writer, photographer and former CalArts Critical Studies faculty Janet Sternburg presents her first solo U.S. museum show at USC’s Fisher Museum of Art.

Opening on Tuesday, Sept. 18, the exhibition – titled LIMBUS – will present a selection of older and newer works demonstrating the artist’s poetic approach to photography and process of layering images to capture both an inner and outer experience.

In her artist’s statement, Sternburg writes, “Limbus was defined by the Renaissance physician Paracelsus to describe a hem in the universe between body and spirit. In current usage, it is the name of the rim of the cornea where the pupil meets the white of the eye. It is the home of infinitely generative stem cells that cross the limbus to maintain and replenish the cornea.”

Further expounding upon the show’s title, Sternberg created a limbus for each piece in the show, tracing within each image to cross the limbus border. Using single-use and iPhone cameras, Sternburg’s photographs don’t seek to recreate the real world, but rather inspire an ambiguous and complex way of seeing.

A visual artist as well as an author of essays, memoir and poetry, Sternburg is the wife of former CalArts president Steven D. Lavine. Her work is currently on view at the Contrasto Galleria in Milan and will soon be shown at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai, India.

An opening reception for LIMBUS will be held on Saturday, Sept. 15.