Andrea Modica

Andrea Modica

Best Friends

April 30 - June 1, 2014

Prior to creating her series Best Friends, artist Andrea Modica had been photographing young people in a Connecticut high school. Most of her portraits featured individual teens, but very quickly she noticed that each subject's best friend would often be present in the background during these photoshoots. Soon she started photographing friends together, capturing the intensity of these important relationships formed during the challenging years of adolescence. From Connecticut, Modica went on to work in other high schools--first in Philadelphia, and later in Modena, Italy--to create her series of platinum palladium prints from 8x10 negatives. Modica's meticulous craftsmanship is evident in each work, as well as her patience and attention to detail. She waits for just the right moment to click the shutter, revealing the piercingly defiant, occasionally wistful, or frankly ambivalent faces staring back at us.  

Best Friends is exhibited at Blue Sky in collaboration with Tilt Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Andrea Modica is a fine art photographer based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She holds an MFA from Yale University and currently teaches in the department of photography at Drexel University. Modica has exhibited numerous solo shows nationally and internationally, and her work is housed in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Center for Creative Photography, the International Center of Photography, the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Portland Art Museum, among many others. Modica is a prior recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and received the Anonymous Was A Woman Award in 2010 to travel to Modena, Italy to expand the scope of Best Friends.