#BLESSED / Curated by Christin Aucunas

February 13 - May 23, 2015

#Blessed brings together 8,000 digital Instagram snaps, all taken in a single day and presents them IRL (in real life). Curator, Christin Aucunas, mined Instagram for images with #blessed, a hashtag that has been used over 34 million times since Instagram’s inception. Users classify their own sense of "#blessed" making the content wildly diverse from the spiritual to the profane. In a community as unique and as global as Instagram’s users, what is our collective view of #blessed in a world where the secular and spiritual often strain to exist together? The exhibition does not seek to offer any definite answer to these questions, but offers  a visual trace of the curators own adventures in the digital photographic playground.

Header image: #Blessed (installation)

#Blessed explores the wealth of digital images in a temporal and physical space - real time, real world. With an estimated trillion photographs produced in 2014, Instagram has become a critical hub for taking, sharing and monetizing photographs. Through a system of self identifying hashtags user organize their images by own definition, making the content both varied and telling.

The Granary Art Center invites the public to participate in the exhibition with a live stream of of their interpretation of “#blessed” with their own hashtag #BlessedGAC on Instagram.

About the Curator

Christin Aucunas is a graduate for the University of Manchester having received her MA in Photography. She completed her undergraduate degree at the George Washington University in International Affairs. Her research interests include networked photography, GIF animation, User-Generated Content and contemporary photographic practices around gender and multiculturalism. You can find her in Park City, Utah, Chicago, London and always online. hashtagblessed.org + ChristinAucunas.com