Neither here nor there (000000 - ffffff) © Ariel C. Wilson

Ariel C. Wilson is a photographer and educator currently based in West Virginia. While presenting her work on the main stage at the SPE national conference in March, Wilson posed a simple but provocative question: where does the photographic image end, and the page begin?

Wilson’s series To See From Somewhere builds on the artist’s broad and overlapping interests: image materiality, or the lack of it; the role of accident or happenstance in one’s creative practice, resisting the limits imposed by representationalism, and abstraction as a means to recognize systems of inequality in and outside the art world.

After seeing Wilson speak at SPE, we spoke about her unique approach to non/image making.

Roula Seikaly in conversation with Ariel C. Wilson

At first glance, Dan Boardman’s new series 2014 might appear to be a digital mash-up of sampled cartoons, images jacked from Google searches, and stock photography outtakes. In our current era where photographic truth is often more commonly questioned than taken for granted, it’s easy to assume his work contains some level digital manipulation, perhaps commenting on its permeation into so many facets of everyday life. But Boardman’s playful melted creations are surprisingly made by hand, painstakingly, in camera, with barely any adjustments in Photoshop, and reference vintage cinematic tricks more than those associated with any proclaimed “digital revolution.” These images, which can appear cut up, composited, and sometimes broken into 4-panel grids, ultimately address his ideas about photography’s ability to authentically represent reality, while reawakening his own affinity to the medium.

Ariel C. Wilson's (Im)materially Material Photographs Reflect the Limits of Representation

Dan Boardman's Delightfully Confusing and Surprisingly Analog In-Camera Photo Collages