group show 57:
New Psychedelics
About the Artists
Fabrizio Albertini
Bio: Fabrizio Albertini (b. 1984) graduated in Film Direction and Production at the International Academy of Audiovisual Sciences CISA Pio Bordoni (Lugano - Swiss). His photographic series have been exposed, among the others, at Aperture Foundation (Usa - NY), SK Stiftung Kultur (Germany - Cologne). His work has been shown, among the others, at International Locarno Film Festival. He publishes, with the publishing house Skinnerboox, the books “The Mecca of Coney Island” (2014), “Diary of an Italian Borderworker” (2016); with the publishing house Linea di Confine the book “Red desert Now!” (2017).
Statement: I've started by photographing my garden. I was searching at something close to me. Today I'm still taking picture of my vegetable garden, I can't help. I was photographing Radici (roots), only Radici. I've drove my car up to the Cannobina Valley, the valley where my grandparents have lived, where my mother grew up, where I've spent my childhood. I've done this because, also there, I've a beautiful garden. Radici is a story about resilience, is a novel of nature, form and memory. The write of Radici begin in the Cannobina Valley, it starts with a landscape of misty memories childhood images. Radici is the elaboration of a conflict in the present, where the success, in terms of life, depends by the act to sustain a form.
M. Apparition
Bio: I am an abstract/conceptual/experimental photographer. Born and raised in New York, I studied photography at Fakulta Akademie Múzických Umění (FAMU), Prague, Czech Republic and the International Center of Photography, New York, NY. Work has been in numerous group exhibitions, most recently "Light Sensitive 2018" at Art Intersection, Gilbert, AZ. I was awarded Honorable Mention-Best Abstract in the 2017 Tokyo International Foto Awards. My work can currently be seen in The Hand Magazine, Issue 20.
Statement: My work is about trusting what isn't yet known. Using experimental processes, the images resonate beyond my consciousness. The viewers are invited to project their own associations onto the work, engaging in the pleasures of discovery and surrender. "A work of art ... is always completed by the viewer and is never seen the same way by any two persons." --David Smith "Explanation is the killer of all wonderment." -- Felix Barrett MBE, Punchdrunk
Antoni Benavente
Bio: Born in 1964 in Lleida (Spain) Antoni Benavente began his artistic career in the nineteen-eighties. Benavente studied Visual Art and Graphic Design in the Municipal School of Fine Arts of Lleida. His work has been selected in diverse national and international photographic exhibitions and festivals. His artistic work forms part of both public and private collections. He currently works and lives in Lleida and is represented by PetitGaleria.
Statement: My work is composed mostly of photographic series of my walks through towns, cities and their peripheries. Spaces where instants of a certain "magical realism" arise and which I especially like to capture. Most of my work is done in black and white. I think grayscale representation conveys the essentials of what I have perceived and wish to communicate.
Alexander Binder
Bio: Alexander was born on Halloween night 1976 in the Black Forest. He’s a self-taught photographer using vintage lenses, prisms and optical toys. His work is rooted in the history of Symbolism and shows a strong passion for the spiritual and the surreal. Alexander exhibits his photos internationally (Germany, France, UK, Poland, US, Canada, Northern Ireland, Italy, Netherlands). The images were featured in VICE, LODOWN, SLEEK, TUSH, TWIN, GUP, BLOW Photo, China National Image, Fotografia, theguardian.com and many more. His works have been published in photo books and monographs by Yard Press, Morel Books, Tangerine Press, Lugemik, Centipede Press and Laurence King Publishing.
Statement: Sator Arepo is an ongoing photo-project about the place where Johann Georg FAUST (the protagonist of Christopher Marlowe’s play and Goethe’s Faust) was born around 1480. It’s a tiny village in Southwest Germany, which has still today a very unique aura thanks to its timbered houses and old buildings. Despite making a traditional photo documentary about this site, I tried to capture the transcendental quality of the place via self-made pinhole lenses, longtime exposure, crystals and color filters.
Jessy Boon Cowler
Bio: Jessy Boon Cowler is a photographic artist from London, currently studying her Masters in Photography at the Arts University Bournemouth.
Statement: Using both analogue and digital techniques, she combines her love of nature, other-worldliness and sensuality through digital and physical collage, creating atmospheric visions that are carnal, beautiful and surreal.
Jane Christensen
Bio: Jane Christensen lives and works in Provo, Utah.
Statement: I have been thinking about the relationship I have with my environment and the potential for an individual's psychology to reflect onto a location and a location's potential to influence an individual.
Cody Cobb
Bio: Cody Cobb (b. 1984 in Shreveport, Louisiana) is a photographer based in Seattle, Washington. His photographs attempt to capture brief moments of stillness from the chaos of nature.
Statement: For weeks at a time, Cobb wanders the American West alone in order to fully immerse himself in seemingly untouched wilderness. This isolation allows for more sensitive observations of both the external landscape as well as the internal experience of solitude. Through subtle arrangements of light and geometry, the illusion of structure appears as a mystical visage. These portraits of the Earth's surface are an attempt to capture the emotion of the land as much as the topography.
Skyler Crady
Bio: Currently residing in Olympia, WA, Skyler Crady recently earned her BFA degree at Central Washington University. There, she studied photography and metalsmithing. She is interested in exploring the flaws and imperfections of analog photography as well as the relationship we have with textiles and fabrics through her jewelry work.
Statement: Photographers are taught that perfection is everything. We are trained to look at an image for its’ ideal exposure, contrast, sharpness, etc. With pinhole photography, obtaining the “perfect” image is not realistic. Flaws are inevitable. With that, I let go of the ideal image and embraced the flaws that come with pinhole photography. Instead of aiming for clear, “legible” photographs, my final pieces came out as abstracted fragments of light, creating unique imagery.
Bio: Mathias de Lattre is a photographer based in Paris, France. He exposes the consciousness as an uncertain process and unstable determination. The most powerful paradox of its work is because he reaches in his own way to a kind of photographic magic realism. His work is held on the threshold of an intimate and powerful revelations and introduce through the half-opened door of a picture.
Statement: With his work in progress Mother's Therapy, he goes into a new, still secret but quite whole adventure directed to the seizure by the image of modification of the consciousness. Even if he knows that it is useless, for example, "to show" a psychic disturbed state to make feel to the one who sees it what involves such a same moment when he is "lived", he notes the fact that it is important to make a step furthermore to try to make it "visible", in our consciousness, to ourself. As he is himself crossing the threshold, and penetrate into the room of mysteries, his images are made more and more radical and precise. Because, strangely, approaching the mystery is not made by a recourse to indistinctness, but quite the opposite, by a strengthened attention. Today, with this new stage of its approach, the work of MDL travels at the speed of light and with the slowness of the land surveyor of forests and primitive caves, this tear, this gap, which constitute at the same time its subject, its house and its future.
Anargyros Drolapas
Bio: Born in Athens, Greece Studied Physics and IT. He has steadily pursued photography since 2010 with images of his being published on online magazines, with two solo exhibitions and by taking part in various group exhibitions.
Statement: "The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world "picturesque."" —Susan Sontag
Katherine Finkelstein
Bio: Katherine Finkelstein is attracted to light and inspired by the spirit world, seeking access through the medium of photography. She received her BA from the Bard College Photography program in 2007 and completed her MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Low-Residency program in the summer of 2017. She is based in New York City and runs Motherbox Gallery, a natural-light exhibition space, out of her apartment.
Statement: These photographs and photograms are part of an ongoing project using prisms and other handmade optics, to conjure worlds beyond our own and connect with spirits who have passed on from this one. With reference to alchemists working on the cusp of the Enlightenment, my work examines the fluid boundary between fact and fiction, generating a narrative that examines how reality is shaped by the methods one uses to see.
Doug Fogelson
Bio: Doug Fogelson studied photography at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College Chicago. His photographic pieces are included in notable public and private collections such as The J. Paul Getty Center, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Cleveland Clinic and exhibited with esteemed galleries.
Statement: Chemical Alterations is an ongoing series to engage with and appreciate nature while commenting on the impacts of climate change, ecocide and extinction. I photograph the landscape in biologically diverse regions and then use common/industrial chemicals to alter the resulting imagery.
Peter Franck
Bio: Peter Franck was born in Überlingen/Germany. 1987 he started studying painting/graphics at the university of fine arts in Nürnberg. 1993 he finished his studies at the university of fine arts/ Stuttgart( Masterclass R.Schoofs). After this he had his first contacts with photography over his brother who is also an photographer. With his from fine art paintings influenced photographies he took part at many exhibitions such as the Fotofestival Naarden, the photosummer Stuttgart, the Art Fair Cologne. Parallel to his photographic work he also continued to work at his paintings which are totally contrasting to the photographic works.
Statement: The found pictures ( from the archive of the Visual Studies work shop in Rochester, New York and from digital image archives like the Library of Congress ) serve as a foundation for new stories, so they do not hurt any privacy, but play with the look and feel of former times. The projections of our time in the context of our art history are based on the time of our fathers and grandfathers. This was the flowering season . The high times of Kodak and the images try to take this time into our time and fill this "primer" with new content.
Leah Freed
Leah Freed’s work is an extension of her obsessive need to create photographs as escape. It’s a means of coping with every day stressors – things that linger and absorb mental focus, time, and energy. Through the constant act of making, Leah is able to reflect, process and reflect again in a continuous cycle. The image included in this exhibition is one of hundreds of manipulated prints made from the same negative, and meticulously cycled through various darkroom processes to resemble a simple plane of mystical stars
Lyndon French
Bio: Lyndon French grew up in Metro Detroit surrounding himself around Detroit’s scenery: from its’ abandoned buildings to Belle Isle. He later moved to Chicago finishing his BA in photography at Columbia College Chicago. He’s rooted in American Midwest culture: blue collar, car culture and house music.
Statement: Lyndon’s work is often referencing Americana culture, exploring subjects ranging from clairvoyance (things beyond the normal sensory), the history of portraiture to Astro vans. He photographs details to spacious imagery to convey the story or method at hand that will provide a wider vision of the subject matter.
Laura Glabman
Bio: Laura Glabman is a fine-art photographer working on Long Island. She studied printmaking at SU and photography at SVA but left school early to enter into her family's sign making business. She worked there for 25 years as a sign painter and graphic artist. She is now retired and is pursuing photography. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions and has been featured on the photography blogs Feature Shoot, aCurator, Globel Yodel, and on Humble Arts Instagram.
Statement: I have been altering my photographic images since my early days in college when everything was done in the darkroom. I have tried to stay to true to my photography with a very straight approach but every so often I am swayed over by a new app on my iPhone that will keep me busy for hours playing and altering images and changing my perception of what my original intent was meant for.
Kris Graves
Bio: Kris Graves (b. 1982 New York, NY) is a photographer and publisher based in New York and London. He received his BFA in Visual Arts from S.U.N.Y. Purchase College and has been published and exhibited globally, including the National Portrait Gallery in London, England; Aperture Gallery, New York; University of Arizona, Tucson; Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon; and Brooklyn Museum, New York; among others. Permanent collections include the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Wedge Collection, Toronto; and Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania.
Statement: Kris Graves creates artwork that deals with what he views wrong with American society and aims to use art as a means to inform people about social issues. He also works to elevate the representation of people of color in the fine art canon; and to create opportunities for conversation about race, representation, and urban life. Graves creates photographs of landscapes and people to preserve memory.
Garrett Grove
Bio: Garrett Grove (b. 1982, USA) gained an MFA in Photography from the University of Hartford (2017) after following a BA from Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA (2005). He lives and works in Ventura, California.
Statement: Journey to the Interior walks through American mythology and pictures the emotional landscape that has been left in the path of Man's constant search for progress. This project originates from my interest and anxieties regarding American identity and our self-aggrandized history, questioning the power that an idealized past holds over the real life of the present.
Kristen Grzeca
Bio: Kristen Grzeca is an interdisciplinary artist with a focus in photography based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In December of 2018, she will receive a Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art with a concentration in Photography from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Grzeca's current work deals with both abstract and classical ideas of mythology. She is interested in perception versus reality and how the two are connected.
Statement: For this series, I created a floral arrangement and shot the scene in its entirety. Then I used a macro lens to focus on specific areas, while lighting them with a variety of colored gels. In post-production, I blended the original photo with the macro shots to create a series of whimsical images.
Bill Gubbins
Bio: Bill Gubbins is a photographer who lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
Statement: These photos depict, metaphorically, visions and emotional experience during the psychedelic experience.
Lena Gudd
Bio: In between narration and documentation, Lena Gudd (1986, Germany) explores the interplay of inner & outer landscapes, combining aesthetic and anthropo-geographical research in the polar and circumpolar regions. For her image-based work, she draws on photography as a process, approach and philosophy, using the medium as compass to maneuver in between visible and invisible spheres. Together with Antonin Pons Braley, Gudd is dedicated to the research-creation laboratory An Archive of Norths.
Statement: Collage Notes are Gudd’s visual sketches, exploring notably the relation to mountain landscapes as sources of inner strength and imagination - drawing on Blåmann, a mountain situated on Kvaløya in Northern Norway, to which Gudd developed a quotidian and intimate relationship. Through the medium of collage, Gudd combines her analogue photography with objects and manual gestures to compress in the end layer after layer with her phone into a single Collage Note.
Jeremy Haik
Bio: Jeremy August Haik is an artist and writer. His work has been exhibited at Aperture Gallery, NY; Foley Gallery, NY, Unseen Photo Fair, Amsterdam; Newspace Center for Photography, Portland; Cindy Rucker Gallery, NY; Michael Matthews Gallery, NY; The Camera Club of NY, and Guest Spot, Baltimore. His work has been published by Conveyor Editions, Mt. Figure, Der Greif, and Baxter St. CCNY. His book Permanent Constructions was published by Silent Face Projects in 2015.
Statement: These photos are still-lifes arranged using 4x5 negatives, inkjet prints, gels,and altered book pages. I’ve created some components by photographing the Arizona desert, and others by photographing appropriated images of clouds and astronomical objects on my computer screen and using the resulting negatives in my compositions. I’m interested in creating images that might look artificial, or digitally generated, but are simply truthful recordings. I think there’s still hope for truth in art (and elsewhere).
Jacob Haupt
Bio: Jacob Haupt (b. 1989, Modesto, California) is an artist working with photography, video, and sculpture. After completing the book Infinity Gate with Noah Jackson in 2015, he recently released a photobook of his own, Gloom. Airlock Gallery (CA) hosted his first solo show Beyond the Super Rainbow in 2015, and he has continued to exhibit nationally, internationally, online, and in print. His work has been featured by Humble Arts Foundation, Der Greif, Don/Dean, and Ordinary Magazine.
Statement: My pictures are often about moments of transformation, moments of tension, and moments where paradoxes and boundaries are frayed and questioned. They are filmic and also emotional, so for me, they capture feelings like when in Terminator 2: Judgement Day T-800 lowers himself into the molten iron while delivering a farewell thumbs up to John Connor, or receiving the announcement of my parents’ divorce after staying up all night to defeat Dagoth Ur in the game Elder Scrolls III Morrowind, or secretly thinking that I am the Saiyan Prince Vegeta from Dragonball Z, or tearing up every time I hear Sheik’s Theme from Ocarina of Time, or wishing Goro beat Johnny Cage, and that Darth Maul was a good guy.
Scott Hazard
Bio: Scott Hazard is an artist and environmental designer based in Raleigh, North Carolina. He is the recipient of an Artist Fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council. Born in San Diego, Hazard earned degrees in fine art and landscape architecture at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo and the University of Florida.
Statement: Hazard constructs intimate portal like spaces and cathartic micro-gardens using multitudes of layers of torn or cut photographic images and paper with text. As the viewer’s gaze enters and traverses the layers of images in each work, vision becomes tactile, lending an articulated viewing experience and a space for the eyes to linger in each image. The viewer looks ‘at’ and ‘through’ each composition simultaneously.
Justin Hill
Bio: The artist grew up in New Jersey, Germany, California, Idaho, and Washington State. The artist received an MFA from Syracuse University in 2017 and currently works as a social worker in a small town and contributes stock photography on the side.
Statement: Second Nature is an ongoing collection of compulsions capturing moments of anxiety regarding the artist's existential angst and the inability to separate oneself from nature- accepting the fate of death and ones own irrelevance. The cycle of life continues as the work develops, and the artists own attempt at permanence is possible only through the digital realm. Second Nature serves as a tribute to Edvard Munch's The Scream.
Jamey Hoag
Bio: Jamey Hoag was born and raised in California. He currently resides in Los Angeles. A self taught photographer – he has a family, a job, sits in traffic and makes photographs mostly for creative and therapeutic purposes.
Statement: Jamey Hoag was born and raised in California. He currently resides in Los Angeles. A self taught photographer – he has a family, a job, sits in traffic and makes photographs mostly for creative and therapeutic purposes.
Thomas Locke Hobbs
Bio: Thomas Locke Hobbs studied at the Talleres de Estética Fotográfica in Buenos Aires, Argentina between 2009 and 2011. In 2015 he received an MFA from Arizona State University. His work deals with the intersections of place, identity, landscape and economics. Deeply engaged with the history of photography, his work attempts to form a contemporary response to the built environment, one that incorporates critique but also transcends it, while searching for a lyrical response to the everyday. He has exhibited work in Cuzco, Buenos Aires, Lima, London and Phoenix.
Statement: This work comes out of my encounter with classic modernist photography of the 20th century. Seeing the work in person for the first time I was inspired by the craft and the ways of seeing but also frustrated by the hetero-patriarchal tendencies so neatly summed up in the term “straight photography.” This work comes out of my deep involvement with the medium and its materials as I explore landscapes, desires, all the while inspired by my love of disco music.
Matt Hulse
Bio: British artist working with film, photography, music, sound, performance, word and community since 1989.
Statement: I work with whatever is to hand, aiming to create work that is striking, witty and beautiful. In this case of these five images I have been exploring the limitations of a $9 telescopic lens attached wonkily to my old mobile phone.
Rachael Jablo
Bio: Rachael Jablo’s work deals with issues of growth, the body, and violence through photography and collage. Her monograph, My days of losing words (Kehrer Verlag) was featured on Slate, Lenscratch, and NPR. Jablo’s work has been exhibited widely, with solo shows at UCLA and George Lawson Gallery in San Francisco. In Europe, her work has been seen at the Museum für Photographie in Braunschweig and Rasche Ripken Gallery in Berlin. She lives in Berlin.
Statement: Refracted growth deals with concepts of growth and regeneration using the indexical language of botanical photograms and collage.
Charlie Kitchen
Bio: Charlie Kitchen was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. He received his BFA in Photography from Texas State University San Marcos in 2014. He now resides and works in San Antonio, Texas.
Statement: My work explores photographic space through large format in-camera collage.
Jesse Koechling
Bio: Some of my earliest memories were of images magically forming under the red glow of my dad’s darkroom on Orr’s Island, Maine. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs prior to attending Pratt Institute. I live and work, slowly and deliberately, in Brooklyn, NY.
Statement: Photographically driven, my artwork varies in technique and subject yet desires connection. Recording what presents itself to me and where my thoughts lie, an ambiguous diary unfolds finding balance, forming layers, and developing correlations. Subjects flow amongst time and perception, solitude and connection, and discovering our place within the universe... weaving the tiniest of details to the grandest scale of the infinite always building upon the past and moving towards the future.
Holly Lay
Bio: Holly Lay is a 2nd year MFA candidate who finds inspiration by mining the internet's digital archives, collecting references to cyber culture, femininity, craft and kitsch. She received her BFA from Ball State University with an emphasis in photography and intermedia arts in 2013 before attending UNLV.
Statement: I have always been heavily influenced by 60s new wave cinema, psychedelia, and how this changed society. Experimenting with repetition and form, these images explore women’s identity, myth and celebrity. I believe we are just amalgams of the past trying to reflect a fleeting present that is simply a refraction of light captured in a lens.
Dionne Lee
Bio: Dionne Lee (b. NYC 1988) is an Oakland based artist. Lee received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2017. Her work has been exhibited at Aperture Foundation, the school of the International Center of Photography in New York City; Aggregate Space and LAND AND SEA in Oakland; San Francisco Arts Commission, Root Division, and Embark Gallery in San Francisco. In 2016 she was awarded the Barclay Simpson Award a Graduate Fellowship at Anderson Ranch Arts Center.
Statement: My practice is based in photography, collage, and video, and engages ideas of agency and racial histories in relation to the American landscape. In my work I explore my relationship to nature and present gestures of claim over where I am positioned historically, culturally, and personally within the American landscape. I am interested in the complications that exist within representations of the American landscape beyond the traditional context of refuge, a space of peak contentment and peace, but rather its dual legacies: violence and prosperity, connection and alienation.
Phillip Lewis and Peter Happel Christian
Bio: Lewis and Happel Christian are based in Tennessee and Minnesota respectively. Beyond their individual projects, their collaboration has been ongoing for 10 years. They were the first artists to receive the Ansel Adams Research Fellowship from the Center for Creative Photography. They have produced and published 4 artists books. They are current recipients of a Visual Arts Fund grant from Midway Contemporary.
Statement: LANDS END engages in a process by which standard mail-order catalogs are received in the post, scanned, and spun into new imagined forms. The images disrupt the ubiquitous visual languages of desire and romanticized living and nudge the viewer into a digital wilderness and other worldly state. Lost in the pixels of representational commercial photographs, the images are explored from the inside out and bent into sensorial expressions.
Elsa Leydier
Bio: Elsa Leydier was born in 1988 in France. After studying languages, she entered the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles in 2012. She graduated in 2015, and now lives between Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Lyon (France). In her photographic work, she aims to interrogate images that are used to define iconic places and territories, and tries to show them from other points of view, through the prism of alternative and lesser stories. Her work has been shown in several shows like in Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie (Arles, France), in Le Réverbère Gallery (Lyon, France), Chez Agnès b., Les Filles du Calvaire Gallery (Paris, France), and Alianza Francesa de Bogotá (Colombia) among others.
Statement: My photographic works starts when postcards start to break apart. During the exploration of territories which are foreign to me, on which I settle or that I travel at time, I am in search of stories; stories or images which will then nuance the dominant representations, put in wrong stereotypical images and iconic views of the territory. My work is about visual representation of regions across Brazil and Latin America in general. While considering dominant and stereotypical representations, I try to nuance them, by reducing each work to their condition, or by revealing the flaws and limits. I construct and manipulate my images, in order to propose the viewer not to submit themselves to the imposed point of view, but rather to step outside of themselves and view my work through the prism of other stories, in order to escape the dominant stereotypes of people and territories.
Terri Loewenthal
Bio: Terri Loewnthal is an Oakland-based artist whose recent work explores the intersection of landscape and psyche. In her new series, Psychscapes, Loewenthal investigates the sublime expanse of land and sky romanticized in the still-potent mythology of Utopian California. Psychscapes are single-exposure, in-camera compositions that utilize special optics developed by Loewenthal to compress vast spaces into complex, evocative environments. These photographs combine straightforward landscape photography with explorations into the psychology of perception.
Statement: I was referring to these images as psychedelic even before I made them. To have a psychedelic experience is to free your mind from its normal constraints. When I had the idea, I was able to alter the colors of the natural world in my mind. Skies were pink and leaves were blue. I’ve always been envious of painters’ ability to shift reality in whichever direction they choose. With this work, I wanted to do something similar: create a world that is familiar yet also wild, otherworldly. I'm extending an invitation – not to view untouchable, pristine places from a distance, but rather – to step inside and move beyond the confines of our everyday perceptions.
Alex Lysakowski
Bio: Alex Lysakowski’s work focuses on industrial architecture, its formal elements, and structural interaction within surrounding landscapes.
Statement: “Antistructure” is a body of work that focuses on exaggerated architectural forms within banal spaces. The farcical nature of the manipulated structures creates a surreal world of absurdity in an otherwise mundane landscape.
Levi Mandel
Bio: Born: Seattle, WA. Currently living and working in New York, New York.
Statement: Levi Mandel’s sensibility is one that follows true throughout his body of work––there’s no time for the typical. By applying his ethos as a portrait photographer to his travel stories, he introduces emotion into static landscape, capturing surreality within the ordinary. His unconventional aesthetic is a seductive one and reflects through his commercial and editorial work, capturing the unexpected beauty of the strange juxtapositions found in unaltered life. When he is not on assignment, he is documenting artists and their studios, photographing dog-walkers’ packs, and exploring forgotten cities throughout America.
Bradley Marshall
Bio: Bradley Marshall (b. 1988) is a photographer from Nashville, TN. He received his MFA from East Tennessee State University in 2018. In 2016 he worked as studio assistant for artist Mel Chin. He will attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture as artist-in-residence in summer of 2018.
Statement: Hearing Through Walls is an exploration into American masculinity, lost youth, and domesticity. The work takes the form of a fragmented and subjective narrative, where a flawed male viewpoint is constructed and developed, in efforts to then subvert it. Working with and against the tropes and stereotypes of the male coming of age narrative, I attempt to better contend with my own conflicted feelings surrounding these themes, as well as acknowledge my own inclusion within this tumultuous narrative.
Pete Mauney
Bio: Pete Mauney lives and works and likes to be alone in the dark.
Statement: After decades of experience with both photography and psychedelics, my assesment is that fireflies are more like mushrooms and airplanes are more like acid.
Joseph Minek
Bio: Joseph Minek is an artist based in Cleveland Ohio. Joseph received his Masters of Fine Arts degree in Photography & Film from Virginia Commonwealth University and his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in photography from the Cleveland Institute of Art. He has exhibited his work in spaces such as the Cleveland Museum of Art, Galerie Kornfeld (Berlin), Gallery 1/1 (Seattle), and Denny Gallery (New York).
Statement: Through a mixture of process art and minimalist abstraction, I question how to depict photography as a self-reflexive entity. Through various ways of applying photographic chemicals to the exposed paper, I purposefully test the edges of what happens when different parameters are intentionally set beyond their limits. The finished works are luminescent, vivid-colored abstract compositions on glossy, metallic paper that resemble modernist abstract paintings; a deliberate use of aesthetic tropes intended to question it’s making.
Jay Muhlin
Bio: Jay Muhlin is an artist, educator, and photographer currently living and working in Philadelphia, PA. He works with artist books and multiples and works at the Science History Institute photographing and working with curators across the museum and library working with rare books, archives, fine art, photographs, and culturally important scientific tools and ephemera documenting the 20th-21st century history of science.
Statement: I work primarily in photography with a focus on artist books. My work addresses the ideas of loss, intimacy, comfort, anxiety, and masculinity. Central to this exploration is an examination of and response to how myths and metaphors are communicated visually. This results in multivalent narratives that not only define my subjects with empathy and seek an emotional truth, but reveal the complex relationship between myself as photographer and the subject.
Rebecca Najdowski
Bio: Rebecca Najdowski is a Melbourne-based visual artist investigating the materiality of photomedia and the complicated ways perception of nature and the notion of landscape are entangled. Her works have been exhibited and screened internationally — throughout the United States, and in England, Italy, Greece, Brazil, Colombia, and Australia. Rebecca received her MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco and was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil.
Statement: The ongoing project Ambient Pressure is formed through studio and darkroom interventions of straightforward landscape imagery. I have mined my archive of negatives and manipulated their structure — cutting, scratching, burning, tearing, taping, folding— to give a sense of additive-erasure. Through this process, I aim to highlight the notion of landscape as a construct by drawing attention to the materiality of the photographic surfaces as a reminder of its mediating conditions.
Brandon Nichols
Bio: Brandon Nichols is a professional studio photographer living and working in Denton, Texas. Since graduating from the University of North Texas in 2011 with a BFA in photography, his work has been exhibited internationally. In 2015 his work was included in Aperture Gallery’s prestigious Summer Open and has been featured in Vice’s Creators Projects “5 Photographers Who Are Hitting Big in 2016”. He has also received multiple grants from the Dallas Museum of Art.
Statement: I want to show a world without distinctions or obstructions where infinite energies melt down eternal forms. This is an ongoing project consisting of fluid .gifs that express a message of interconnectedness. Last year I had an important spiritual psychedelic experience that has had a profound effect on my life and work. The most important idea I found was that it’s all created from one groovy medium that has infinite potential to create.
Michael Oshea
Bio: I was born in the late 70’s in New Jersey, an actual state of irony. Through skateboarding I found punk rock, through punk I found art. I am interested in how photography can depict pyschological states. I received an MFA from Pratt in 2004.
Statement: These diptychs are attempts to use nature's patterns to create a repetition or echo.This echo should feel like the repeating void of the universe. Atoms and molecules lining up, creating patterns that repeat over and over again. These pictures are a meditation on the multiverse theory that in a infinite universe, an infinite amount of possibilities exist, including this moment, over and over again forever.
Benoit Paillé
On the road living in his camper since 2013, Benoit Paille is an atypic artist, conscience agitator, creative genius, monstrously curious, absent and edgy. Soon in his life he became surrounded by secondhand smoke and Nicorette patches, which helped him develop his artistic taste. Stoned on Ritalin for most of his crucial years, he undertook a bio-medical career until he fell into photography. Self taught, he became recognized rapidly in the field which brought him to exhibit his work in galleries around the world : Russia, Ukraine, Spain, Amsterdam, France, United States and Quebec to name a few.
Using colorful flashes to outline surreal representations he often sees myself like an hyper realist painter, his pictures documenting an altered state of mind. Cultivating a predilection for casual people and locations, kitsch landscapes, fences and strange parking lots, he’s seeking the unexpected and the unseen.
Zach Phillips
Bio: Zach Phillips studied History and Design at Hampshire College in Amherst Massachusetts. His studies focused on the late 19th and early 20th century European history. His art practice combines both interests of primary source research and storytelling within the book form. In working with archival images, which are then manipulated, Zach is interested in examining the hyperreal.
Statement: GENERATIONS presents a new way of looking at the history of the First World War. A viewer is confronted by images of cheering crowds, colorful propaganda posters, and bodily destruction. However things are not quite as they seem. Within the frame of an image, figures and actions repeat, what appear at first to be crowds of people shift and change upon closer looking. Taken together, one is left to question the seemingly empirical qualities of the archive and the promises of propaganda.
Stacy Platt
Bio: Stacy Platt is a photographer and writer living in Colorado. She uses photography to speak about vulnerability, memory, loss and the mundane experiences of life. Her work is characterized by an interest in exploring the multiple—and sometimes unreliable—versions of self and personal history that we all contain, as well as the contradictory threads of collective identity that serve to both constrain and connect us to one another. She also edits Exposure Magazine.
Statement: All of the Churches in Colorado Springs is a photographic examination that is part documentary, typology, and psychoanalysis. I was raised in a family of radical fundamentalists living in a city that has subsequently become an evangelical mecca. I transform these self-proclaimed spaces of Light & Truth into something decidedly Other by isolating and manipulating their contexts to more precisely articulate my understanding of them as spaces that encourage alienation, bewilderment, fear and the uncanny.
Francesca Pozzi
Bio: Francesca Pozzi is an italian photographer born in 1991. In 2015 she graduated from the Italian Institute of Photography in Milan. Currently she works as a freelance photographer in Milan with different communication agencies, working in parallel to her own projects by participating in international competitions.
Statement: www.francescapozzi.com https://www.behance.net/FrancescaPozzi https://www.ignant.com/2018/03/02/routes-of-the-mind-by-fran- cesca-pozzi/ https://www.mutualart.com/Artist/Francesca-Pozzi/9C75F- 8F314CFC434 http://www.fubiz.net/en/2017/06/21/incredible-pastel-se- ries-by-francesca-pozzi-2/ 2016 IPA International Photography Awards - Honorable Mention Pro - Fine Art : Abstract Category, project ‘Beyond the line’.
Evelyn Pritt
Bio: Photographer from Indonesia.
Statement: I’m using photography as a data collection tool to observe nature and create a visualization of thoughts and questions that arise during the observation.
James Reeder
Bio: James Reeder lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has exhibited at Lesley Heller Workspace (NY, NY), Mixed Greens (NY, NY), A.M. Richard Fine Art (Brooklyn, NY), and Projective City (Paris, France), amongst others. He holds a degree from Pacific Union College (CA) and has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, The New Criterion, and published in Conveyor magazine. Reeder founded and directed Silver Projects, a DIY gallery in Brooklyn.
Statement: FFFFFF or 000000, warm or cool, right or left, reality or fantasy, taken or made, pixels or particles, fever dream or night terror.
Saul Robbins
Bio: Saul Robbins is interested in the ways people interact within their surroundings and the psychological dynamics of intimacy. His photographs are motivated by observations of human behavior and personal experience, especially those related to loss, unity, failure, and the latent potential residing in personal history and traditional photographic materials. Robbins is best known for the series “Initial Intake”, examining the empty chairs of Manhattan-based psychotherapy professionals from their clients’ perspective, “How Can I Help? – An Artful Dialogue”, and "Chemical Peels,” a series of abstract imagery made with exposed and unexposed chromogenic paper processed in traditional color chemistry.
Statement: These unique pieces are rooted in and motivated by personal and physical experience, especially those related to loss, unity, failure, and the latent potential residing in personal history and traditional photographic materials. Made without film, cameras, and often without exposure, I choose to rely on the serendipitous interchanges between shadow and light, exposure and lack thereof, risk, chance, and the alchemy inherent in traditional photochemical processes.
Nicole Rosenthal
Bio: Nicole Rosenthal was born and raised in New York City. She received a BA in art and semiotocs From Brown University and an MFA in photography from the University of Hartford’s low-residency program. Her work has been shown in several group exhibitions in the US, Europe and Cuba and has been published in numerous magazines. Her self published zine New Order of The Ages traveled with 10x10’s “AWAKE” reading room last year.
Statement: The first time I dropped acid was as a teenager on the upper east side of New York City. This was a long time ago, when phones were still tethered to something. The title of this series of photographs is REgent 4 in reference to our old telephone number -- RE4-3487. I am making these pictures to reconnect to where I come from.
Jacob Schlather
Bio: I dropped out of a PhD program in mathematics a few years ago. I've been working as a programmer since. These days I make my art in my spare time.
Statement: My practice grew out of a desire to make my photographs look exactly how I wanted them. How I wanted them to look was impossible, night and day, layers of the same building, so I started making collages. This way, I’m not limited by reality and can express any vision I have.
Jacqueline Schlossman
Bio: Jacqueline Schlossman is a Brooklyn based photographic artist and educator. Her work questions the relationship between nature and culture. She currently teaches photography and digital media at Queensborough Community College.
Statement: I am interested in problematizing the commonly accepted definition of nature and exploring the complexities of its representation. My projects usually require travel and time as I work to refine and develop a series of pictures informed by a a landscape issue. Highlighting the nuanced ways in which culture and the contemporary landscape intermingle, my pictures frame unseen elements and add form to ambiguous spaces. My subject matter has consisted of national parks and golf courses. I'm currently studying the formal properties of a region in California called the Inland Empire. The images included in this grouping are from from a few different projects.
Matthew Shain
Bio: Born in San Francisco. BS in Journalism, BFA in Photography, MFA in Visual Art. Moved around a lot. New York, LA, Chicago, New Orleans. Based out of NO and SF now.
Statement: Photography is a self-reflexive medium. Matthew’s work is an aesthetic and philosophical exploration of this paradoxical space. By choosing a multitude of subjects that reflect his interest in literal and figurative dualities he seeks to create depictions that are neither true, nor false. They can only be known as photographs.
Katie Shapiro
Bio: Born in 1983, Katie Shapiro received an MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 2015 and a BFA in Photography from CalArts in 2007. Her work has been exhibited recently at Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles, LTD Gallery, Los Angeles, Joan, Los Angeles and Aperture Gallery, New York. Her work has received coverage in Artforum, the Los Angeles Times, and New York Magazine. Shapiro lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Statement: In the late 1980’s, a woman known as Star visited several locations around Banff, Canada on a vision quest. I visited the 9 places she was led to in her quest and made photographs in each location. The photographs, collaged with color gels and white tape, serve as a filter to view the documented landscapes. The colored gel layers point toward limitations in our perception and propose what might exist beyond our immediate understanding.
Mike Slack
Bio: Mike Slack lives and works in Los Angeles. His books include The Transverse Path (or Nature’s Little Secret), Walking in Place 1: New Orleans, Shrubs of Death, Ok Ok Ok, Scorpio, and Pyramids. His photographs are in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Statement: “Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.” - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Matthew Smolinsky
Bio: This image is from a small collection of psychedelic images that have grown out of a series of Maine landscapes.
Statement: Grateful Dead
Michael Spears
Bio: Mike Spears was born in Indiana USA and his earliest psychedelic influences was seeing Star Wars for free multiple times at his grandfathers Drive in movie theatre. At age 8 Michael moved to Puerto Rico and really liked break dancing for a minute there. In high school Michael got into punk rock and malcontent in general. Next came weed smoking then Black Sabbath etc. He went to BU for film school and liked Jim Jarmusch flicks. Fast forward to 2018 and he takes lots of trippy (he hopes) pictures.
Statement: Mike Spears aesthetic sensibility exalts things seen but unsung. Attempting to put a cerebral twist on the visual paradoxes encountered. Studying and celebrating the unusual his photographs attempt to invoke reflection and be looked into beyond the surface. Using visual juxtaposition as metaphor the images attempt to narrate a strange fiction revealing the thought process behind them. Whether shooting on the street or in the studio there are consistent tributes to psychedelia in all of Mike’s visual art.
Jon Verney
Bio: Jon Verney is a visual artist working in photography, painting, and film. His creative process lies at the intersection of art and science, and is based in haptic experimentation with photography’s materiality. He currently works in North Adams, Massachusetts.
Statement: I’m interested in photography’s physical mutability, and of approaching photographs as material that can be mined, dissected, sculpted, and dissolved. These works were made from an experimental process of using heat and steam to fracture the emulsion of found photographs, causing the relative banality of the original images to collapse into prismatic abstractions. From there I collaged and scanned them together, highlighting the entropic patterns of the imagery’s unraveling.
Elizabeth Viggiano
Elizabeth Viggiano is an American photographer, living and working in Los Angeles, California. Her inspiration draws from fashion, cinema and 1960s American suburbia. Through her own set design and highly saturated colors, there lies a playful nostalgia in her work similar to mid century advertising.
Citing Los Angeles as a major inspiration, the artist grew up in an antique-crammed home in Stamford, Connecticut, which marked as a catalyst for her interest in vintage lifestyles and design. She began focusing such themes in her work and graduated with a BFA in Photography at Massachusetts College of Art & Design in 2015. Envisioning Hollywood and cinematic photography, Viggiano was drawn to the west coast lifestyle long before her 2017 move and has since continued to make fashion work and produce Americana tableauxs.
Dawn Watson
Bio: Dawn Watson is an artist and activist. Her work examines the fragility of both the natural environment as well as our relationship to it and to each other. After twenty-five years as a dancer and choreographer, Watson transitioned to photography, finding affinity in the visual storytelling offered by both live performance and the captured image. She has exhibited her photographs and artist books throughout the United States including The Griffin Museum of Photography, Albrecht-Kemper Museum, Tilt Gallery, Tang Museum, and a solo exhibition at the Los Angeles Center for Photography.
Statement: Orbiting in space, NASA's GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) mission satellites relay data that has transformed our analysis of the Earth's system. Here on Earth, I make photographs that visually interpret the GRACE data. Based on the potential effects of these seismic shifts, I offer an alternative reality that is present but not yet seen. Delicate details or vast landscapes are familiar yet strange, holding both beauty and decay, alarm and possibilities.