group show 58:
On Death
About the Artists
M. Apparition
Bio: I am an abstract/conceptual/experimental photographer. A native New Yorker, 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 "Wonder" at the Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO. I was awarded Honorable Mention-Best Abstract in the 2017 Tokyo International Foto Awards. My work can currently be seen in Humble Arts Foundation's "New Psychedelics" group show and The Hand Magazine, Issue 21.
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
Bridget Badore
Bio: Bridget Badore is from a small town outside of Syracuse, New York, & currently lives in Brooklyn. She graduated from the School of Visual Arts honors program in 2013 with a BFA in Photography. She began making photographs as a child with her dad's old 35mm camera, teaching herself photography through her late father's scribbled notes and old photography manuals. Her work often deals with nostalgia, vulnerability, and the concept of home.
Statement: When Bridget was three years old, her father died of cancer. For her, photography has become a mechanism to obsessively document her life and indulge in nostalgia. She is preoccupied with death and photographs people close to her as a way to avoid losing them. She has been photographing her family and her younger brother, exploring his relationship to their father’s memory and his own masculinity.
Sophie Barbasch
Bio: Sophie Barbasch is a New York based photographer. She earned her MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BA in Art and Art History from Brown University. Selected grants and residencies include the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Blue Mountain Center, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil.
Statement: I pursue contradiction and dislocation, like the misplacement of an object or the unexpected joining of two things. My visual vocabulary is about texture, weight, density--the heaviness of air, the gravity of bodies. Solid entities begin to move and kinetic entities halt to a stop. People that should be upright are on the ground; people that should be firmly on land are at sea. These contradictions hint at a world ever so slightly off its axis, where expectations are subverted and edges are misaligned.
Daniel Barsotti
Bio: Daniel Barsotti is a photographer living and working in Santa Fe, NM. His work, photographing for arts, cultural institutions, non profit organizations and artists, has been widely published. Throughout his career, he has maintained a singular interest in creating personal and subjective images that are exhibited and included in several self published books.
Statement: Daniel Barsotti collaborated with artist, Kappy Wells, on the book, "gravitas," published in 2015. It is an account of the memories of two lives, two deaths and of grief told with words and pictures. Over a period of three years the two artists wrote, gathered personal objects and historical snapshots, created original drawings and photographs that dealt with the subject of mortality. The book was designed by Arlyn Nathan and tells of a very personal experience between the authors and their process of to create a project about death with wit, whimsy, enthusiasm and sadness. These photographs are a few from the book.
Mat Brutger
Bio: Mat Brutger is a photographer based in Minneapolis, MN. He recently completed his MFA candidate at the Hartford Art School. His work primarily focuses on his family and his midwestern roots.
Statement: Far From Home is a body of work stemming from the time spent with my grandfather during his final days. It investigates aging, failing health, and the loss of a loved one.
Billy Buck
Bio: Billy Buck was born in Northridge, CA and was raised in suburban Illinois. He attended SAIC from 2008-2012, and received his BFA in photography. He currently lives and works in Chicago. His work has been shown nationally and internationally with, Make-Space at MDW Art Fair, MANA Contemporary (Chicago, IL), The Coat Check (Chicago, IL) Nextart Gallery (Gothenburg, Sweden), AWA Gallery (Amsterdam, Netherlands), VAULT Gallery (Jacksonville, FL), Signal Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Arcade Cardiff (Cardiff, Wales).
Statement: Making photographs in the field and in his home studio/darkroom. He investigates anticipation and anxiety by constructing surreal and sometimes bizarre photographs of objects and people that are often commonplace; revealing imagery that entices the senses as much as it repulses them - much like death.
Viviana Carlos
Bio: Viviana Carlos is a visual artist and photographer, her work focuses on current anthropological matters. She creates visual theories building narratives from structures and fragments which are abstracted from the communication she maintains with places and individuals. As a language, through photography, she draw objects and still situations to highlight, construe and bare the highest point of what makes us human.
Statement: Break and Return stimulates the rooted language that remains on the subject of death and funeral alternatives in American culture. It combines two perspectives, the record of the pragmatic qualities developed in a natural burial park and the allegories that are built around it through the participants’ experiences concerning death, grief and oblivion, this aims to reopen and trigger the language about death to a less systematic and more visceral dialogue.
Sandy Carson
Bio: Sandy Carson is a Scottish photographer and cyclist based in Austin, Texas.
Statement: Passing Place is an intimate portrait of both my mother and the village I grew up in the West of Scotland after emigrating to America at a young age. This series deals with separation, space and the invisible family bonds that exist despite physical distance incurred by geographical displacement. The name is inspired by one-lane rural roads with wide spots that are common in Scotland, allowing vehicles to pass each other and continue on their journey.
Alexander Coggin
Bio: Alexander Coggin is an American photographer, artist and theatre-maker living in London. Alexander is a Magenta Flash Forward winner for 2017 and enjoys seeking visual curiosities through a sort-of domestic voyeurism.
Statement: ‘In Casket’ is a series of imagined characters shown in their last visible moments: the open casket processional. Constructed with set designer Leanne MacKay, Coggin explores themes of consumerism, identity and character through this imagined lens of funeral culture.
Tony Chirinos
Bio: Tony Chirinos received a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University in New York. Trained as a Bio-medical photographer in 1985 at Miami Children’s Hospital, later in 1989 Mr. Chirinos created the Medical photography department at Baptist Health Systems in which he worked as the Director until his departure in 2001. Mr. Chirinos is a Fellow of the South Florida Cultural Consortium.
Statement: Death does not discriminate. On the surface, this project has neither race nor gender, which in theory should create a utopian arena. However, this is a space of mortality. Deep within my psyche I know that this body of work is about questioning spirituality. The tactile-like images of wrapped bodies on cool stainless steel gurneys and in refrigerated storage compartments produce a visceral response, which is the primary focus of this project.
Alexa Cushing
Bio: Alexa Cushing is a photographer based out of Boston, MA. She has recently graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, earning a BFA in Photography. She travels by car, making work about the rural New England area where she lives, extracting this sense of magic from the everyday realm.
Statement: Growing up in rural New England, I’ve spent time observing a place carved out by the impacts of passing time, harsh weather, and human presence. Relics of what once existed are displayed, revealing tension that’s tangled between the landscape and its current inhabitants. Residual energy of the past remains constant— a place once defined by working class presence is fractured, leaving the possibility for something new to occur. There is value to a landscape succumbing to its degradation.
Chelsea Darter
Bio: Chelsea Darter received her MFA at Columbia College Chicago in 2018 and her BFA from The University of Iowa in 2013. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and featured online by Light Leaked, Aint-Bad, and Fraction Magazine. Her personal work explores themes of place attachment and identity, particularly the mythology and nostalgia that permeate place.
Statement: Named after the wounded Fisher King of Arthurian Legend, A Prairie Fisher King reflects on familial hardship and generational connection through the lens of place. Consisting of photographs and text, A Prairie Fisher King considers the various myths we construct in order to survive in the face of inevitable change. Through the accumulation of intimately described detail a search for reconciliation becomes palpable.
Jack Deese
Bio: Jack Deese just turned 32 years old. He is married and has two daughters. He makes art when he can, and never knows whether he should say he’s a photographer or an artist. He sells fruit for a living, and teaches when he gets the opportunity, which this fall will be at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Statement: When I’m making art, I feel outside myself, like I don’t exist. I’m operating on every intuition, emotion, and thought that has led up to that moment. Professional downhill skiers say they like to perform while feeling the effects of jet lag. The disorientation allows them to operate on instinct and muscle memory, and they can push the idea of just how crazy what they’re doing really is. That is the feeling I have when I’m making art. I use everything I’ve learned, and read, and seen, and absorbed, to move through the world with my camera, knowing that if I slow down and analyze the decisions I’m making that my will and confidence will succumb to the fear.
Jane Deschner
Bio: Jane Waggoner Deschner grew up in Kansas, moving to Montana in 1977. She exhibits actively and is preparing for a solo show at the University of Michigan–Dearborn, fall 2018. She created a portrait of a progressive woman candidate for “In Her Hands,” Robert Mann Gallery, NYC, showing through August, 2018. She has been awarded numerous residencies/fellowships. She works as an exhibition installer, graphic designer, photographer, instructor, curator and picture framer.
Statement: “Remember me: a collective narrative in found words and photographs” integrates old family photographs with statements/sentiments culled from family/friend-written obituaries from local newspapers and funeral home websites. The photos “read” the texts and vice versa, teasing pretension, tragi-comedy and profound truths about the human condition from sentimental artifacts. This project, ultimately, intimately, illustrates our collective narrative. And in so doing, importantly reminds us, in this acrimonious age, of our commonalities.
Barbara Diener
Bio: Barbara Diener is a lens-based artist living in Chicago and was born and raised in Germany. She holds a MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago and her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Diener’s photographs are part of several private and institutional collections, she has participated in several artist residency programs and has been awarded numerous grants and awards. In June 2018 Daylight Books published Diener’s first book of her work Phantom Power.
Statement: Phantom Power explores my ongoing interest in the intersection of science and faith, and the human desire to believe that something else happens after we die and that a part of us–the spirit or soul–continues on. The paranormal, Spiritualism and theories about the afterlife are ripe with opportunities to visually explore such curiosities. Photography has been linked to the spirit world since the 1860s with the popularity of spirit photography and post-mortem portraits.
Will Douglas
Bio: Will Douglas graduated from VCU BFA 2012 and USF MFA 2018. In 2015 he was in included in the Review Santa Fe top 100 as well as Lensculture's 50 Emerging photographers. This year he received a SPE Student Award for Innovations in Imaging and Lensratch 3rd place student prize.
Statement: I make photographs that indirectly remind the viewer of a familiar vernacular. The cliche photograph is a visual myth with an existing set of ideas. I am using the form of photography against the myth. To create a rift between form and content.
Eric Edvalson
Bio: Eric Edvalson once almost died when a bear entered his cabin at 2:00 AM while working at a summer camp.
Statement: As an interdisciplinary artist, Eric Edvalson works in photography, sculpture, and installation. A common theme in his work is negotiating with unhealthy nostalgia; that despite one's best efforts, youth and its pursuits is disappointingly finite.
Clary Estes
Bio: Clary Estes works on a variety of photography projects from Japan, China, Eastern Europe and the US. She received her Masters Degree in Photojournalism from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in 2013 and moved to Japan as an Ishibashi Zaidan Research Fellow with Nagoya University for 2-years. She then moved to rural Moldova with the Peace Corps before coming back home to work on a project about the opioid crisis in the US.
Statement: As a storyteller, Estes’ interests lie in long-term documentary projects focused on underserved, obscure communities. Her work does not merely document a story straight on; rather, it analyzes and re-analyzes the story over the course of months and years to show the dynamic and complex nature of the stories we live.
Brad Farwell
Bio: Brad Farwell was born in California, where his family has lived for a relatively long time. He went to some impressive schools, then moved to the Bronx, where he lives with his brilliant wife and two interesting children. Often, he spends his day exhorting college students to think about photography.
Statement: By removing the lens, the camera generates a first-hand relic (this-was-there) while communicating to the viewer something which, despite lacking clues of shape or color, is fundamentally closer to my own experience of my memories - internal, regenerated, self-reflexive. Unlike conventional photography, it does not seek to create/override a memory through brute visual force, which I think is pretty interesting. This project is about interpersonal connections, time, and memory... so inevitably also about death.
Annie Flanagan
Bio: Annie Flanagan is a photographer, filmmaker and educator whose work primarily focuses on trauma, gender and sexuality. They most frequently work in rural America. Their work has been recognized by organizations including Alexia Foundation, iPOY, Burn Magazine and New Orleans Photo Alliance. Annie grew up in Washington, D.C. and currently lives in New Orleans with their five roommates and two doggies.
Statement: Shirley (1948-2016) lived in Sidney, Montana, an oil town bordering the Bakken Shale. During the course of her four-year relationship, she was severely strangled by her then-boyfriend. On another instance, he brought her to her family's plot in the town graveyard, threatened her with a machete, pulled her feet out from under her. She fell back onto her sister’s grave. He told her that she would soon wind up there.
Christian Flores-Michel
Bio: Christian Flores-Michel (1984) is a visual artist and photographer based in Berlin, Germany. He’s of Spanish-American descent and was raised in Rome, Italy. Self-taught, he was active from 2003 to 2013 under a pseudonym and achieved recognition for his mixed media works and darkroom montages.
Statement: The first reaction after a death, a breakup, a huge failure is denial, the series “Harmonics” (2013-2018), which these pictures are an excerpt from, investigates how the perception of a same environment, of a same person changes through the years after the loss.
Orestes Gonzalez
Bio: Orestes Gonzalez is a NYC based photographer and curator, and has exhibited extensively in North and South America. His current book, "Julios House" , based on a late, eccentric Cuban uncle, was recently acquired for the permanent book collection of the Metropolitan Museum of NY. It will become an exhibit at the Camera Works Gallery, San Francisco, in November, 2018.
Statement: I take pictures of the changes that surround me on a daily basis. As a baby boomer, I’ve seen how the world has changed drastically in the past 50 years. But more so in the last 15. I see this and realize these changes are replacing customs and traditions. Its like a death. I record these things in order to keep them alive, and to learn from them.
Riley Goodman
Bio: Riley Goodman inquires familial mythologies, folktales, and the greater history of America in effort to understand what endures, and subsequently how this endurance impacts his own presence in the canon. When elements of research and image combine, the resulting work becomes an amalgamation of time, establishing a crafted world that forces the viewer to question the tenants of authenticity. Goodman received his BFA from the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts.
Statement: It’s intriguing to see death described in this call as ‘the end,’ as I’ve come to recognize it rather as a shift in energy from one form to another. The transitional state of one’s passing becomes remarkably striking to myself as I relish not in the singularity of the person, but rather the accompanying ripples that eddy from them. Remnants become silent witnesses tasked to tell the story- allowing the entity to continue living through the unexplainable. One’s death date is not the end but rather a time to begin anew.
Lauren Grabelle
Bio: My work falls in the matrix where fine art and documentary meet; where I can tell truths about our relationships to other people, animals, nature, and ourselves. My work is about empathy.
Statement: (*not a recipe)...Sugar, my dog, muse, and dead thing finder, happily appears in these photographs depicting how nature is as much a culture of death as it is of life. On the edge of great wilderness and wildness in Montana, nature and death, often hand in hand, are found just outside our door.
Karla Guerrero
Bio: Karla G. Guerrero (Mexico City, 1993) photographer based in Mexico City. She received her Bachelor of Communication from Universidad de la Comunicación and her diplomas in Photography from Fundación Pedro Meyer and Academia de Artes Visuales. Her work has been exhibited in Mexico, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Greece. Winner of the National Award of Mexico at the 2018 Sony World Photography Awards.
Statement: Her work is highly influenced by phenomenological states related to the poetic's space and events between the object-subject. The limits within public and private stimulate her to create imaginary scenarios in which she preserves the natural essence of things such as natural light and still life, depicting the causality of an environment.
Gabriel Gutierrez
Bio: Gabriel Gutierrez is a Jersey City based photographer. He hopes to create connections to the world with his camera, as he often feels disconnected and alone. He has a black cat.
Statement: On March 8th, 2001, my brother passed away of a heart attack while practicing for spring track. The high school which he attended erected a memorial near the place he fell. Ever since then, I've found myself attracted to other roadside memorials whenever travelling. These places all tell stories like my own, every single one of them filled with their own feelings of loss and the struggle to move past it. I collect them to feel connected to a greater world who has experienced similar tragedy, a bereavement group of places.
Tahia Farhin Haque
Bio: Tahia Farhin Haque was born in Dhaka in Bangladesh in 1996. Throughout her life she has been fascinated by images and how they can change perceptions. Naturally she was attracted to photography. The interest grew during her early years and later developed when she went to university for bachelors in biochemistry in North South University further when she got full scholarship in a reputed photography school “CounterFoto” in Dhaka during that time. She is currently studying in both institutions. Tahia’s love for photography intensified when she went to ‘Chobi Mela’ during college, it was like being hit, that there another universe present which she and everyone was oblivious to, that photos could tell the untold stories in a way that language cannot. Right then she knew it was something she would like to be part of one day. Later she was influenced and taught about the power of image and how it can change the world for both bad and good by her photography faculty Saiful Haq Omi in CounterFoto. At the age of 19 her photo got exhibited in an international inter university exhibition (IIUPE 2016). A year after that she won 2 awards in a national exhibition (DUPS 2017) which were the first prize and the grand prize, in the same year her photo was published in India in the world-renowned magazine “CREATIVEIMAGE MAGAZINE” curated by the Magnum photographer Raghu Rai. In 2018 she won the Grand prize in India-Bangladesh photography competition by NPC-Fotojajs “Because I was there’. In 2018 she worked with World Press winner Pablo Bartholomew for his exhibition in “Dhaka Art summit” assisting in his installation. She got her first international break by winning the “Special Reportage Prize” in “The New Vanguard Photography Prize” by Document Journal, in partnership with Aperture Foundation, which in October 2018 her work would be exhibited in Aperture Foundation in New York, the jury consisted of curators, editors and photographers from Document Journal, MOMA, Brooklyn Museum and Aperture Foundation.
Statement: I could not save you- a letter to my dead sister I still remember the day you left us. I wish I knew the road that leads to you. I know you are dead, there must be something in a soul that can’t just disappear. It’s full of darkness now. You’re out there somewhere, somewhere. I’d like to find you. Our mother still stays awake the whole night waiting for you, keeps the light on thinking you would find you way home seeking the light. She still smells your clothes, and each year you disappear a little bit more, your face fades a little bit more, your voice becomes unclear a little bit more. Sometimes I wonder would I recognize you, would you still be my teenage sister or someone much older in the last thirteen years has passed. Do you know you changed the course of my life, I am studying to be a researcher in medicine, looking for answers why you died? I could not save you, you were so sick at the end. I never saw you walk, talk, just saw your child-like innocence forever etched in your face. I wonder if you have wings in heaven, because you were our angel. I wonder if you are happy now. What I wouldn’t give to hear see your laughter once more. I love you with everything that I am, for so long I wanted to end my suffering and join you. But I had to figure out that I am someone worth saving, worth living on, and now I can carry you, your heart with mine, everywhere I go.
Carla Jay Harris
Bio: Carla Jay Harris is a conceptual artist living and working in Los Angeles, CA. Her primary medium is photography; however, her work often also takes the form of installation, video and drawing. She received her MFA from UCLA in 2015. Her work - Culture of Desperation - is part of an on-going series documenting the psychological environments she encounters.
Statement: This project captures my experience working in music. There, to support market demand, artists were pushed, burned-out and replaced. Also, corporate commitment was mandated, layoffs were frequent and the older and more experienced waited with trepidation to be replaced by younger, cheaper versions of themselves. Once discarded, all traces of individuals no longer useful were quickly removed. Here I use the power of photography to capture the ghosts of those who passed in this space.
Jessica Harvey
Bio: Jessica Harvey is a Chicago-based artist who explores the myths we create for ourselves and nature while trying to preserve a more desired history. She received an MFA in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art and was awarded a Fulbright Grant to Iceland. She has attended residencies at Ox Bow, ACRE, The Luminary, and VSC. Recent exhibitions include shows at Good Weather, The Luminary, Heaven Gallery, and Wassaic Projects.
Statement: In “Family Portrait,” Jessica Harvey uses the cremated remains of her Aunt and her pets to create photograms of a now deceased family, tied together by ashes. These silver gelatin prints of cremated remains act as a contemporary take on postmortem photography.
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.
Amy Herman
Bio: Amy Herman is an artist based in Charlotte, North Carolina. She received her MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago, and her BFA in Fine Art from Michigan State University. Her photographs have been shown on the international level and are included in the permanent collections of the Kiyosota Museum of Photography and The Museum of Fine Arts Houston. She teaches photography at Central Piedmont Community College and co-directs Goodyear Arts.
Statement: Through this series of self-portraits, I examine how the people and places one considers intimate can inform identity. I translate banal scenes experienced in my everyday life into dramatic tableaux that place an exaggerated importance on the repetition of our most familiar surroundings. I play a variety of roles in my photographs, most notably that of daughter to my mother and father. Through my photographs I seek to challenge conventional familial relationships and understand how my role within that structure is constantly in flux.
Robert Hickerson
Bio: Robert Hickerson is an photographer who creates a majority of his work within his bedroom closet in Brooklyn, NY. Using a saturation of color, and a fascination with horror movies, he examines themes of violence, desire, privacy, and loss. He creates myths from a diary, forming relationships between symbols to make sense of relationships between people. He is an aquarius, rising leo, moon gemini.
Statement: After a decade of keeping tabs on a crush from high school through social media, Hickerson decided in 2017 to meet up and realize a teenage fantasy. Though the chemistry was there, the communication was not, and the relationship withered after six months of making out. It was during this slow death that he created the series “That Went Well” alone in his room, yet again waiting on a text.
Kevin Hoth
Bio: Kevin Hoth has shown work recently at The Houston Center for Photography, The Center For Fine Art Photography, The Colorado Photographic Arts Center, in Fraction magazine Issue 105 and at Walker Fine Art. Kevin has made images spanning diverse processes such as polaroid manipulations, digital manipulations, solo slideshow performances, and video installation art. He lives and works in Boulder, CO and gets regularly woken up by coyote cries, owl hoots, and horse whinnies.
Statement: Kevin Hoth is a photographer whose work focuses on three distinct areas: the manner in which multiple spaces can be formed into a singular frame, how emptiness can be visualized and depticted, and how meaning is ascribed in photographic representations.
Ellen Jantzen
Bio: Ellen Jantzen was born and raised in St. Louis Missouri but now resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Not considering herself a "photographer" but an image-maker, Ellen Jantzen creates work that bridges the world of photography, prints and collage. As digital cameras began producing excellent resolution, Ellen found her perfect medium. It was a true confluence of technical advancements and creative desire that culminated in her current explorations in photo-inspired art using both a camera to capture imagery and a computer to alter and combine the pieces. Ellen was awarded “Special Photographer of The Year” in the 2017 International Photography Awards and 1st place winner in the 2017 International Photography Awards, Digitally Enhanced Category.
Statement: Place of Departure This is the work Ellen Jantzen created right after her parents both suddenly died. As an only child, Ellen’s life has fundamentally changed; but sometimes all seemed the same. Where did her parents; are they now united? What does a life mean after it leaves it's body? Does the life-force rise and connect the terrestrial with the celestial or does it evaporate into thin air? These are the questions Ellen was grappling with as she began this series. “I hope to find my way to an understanding. I now speak with clouds, the earth…. with trees. Words fail me”
Mariah Karson
Bio: Mariah Karson (b. 1979) is a Chicago-based artist and freelance photographer. She studied photography and printmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her work has been exhibited in museums and published internationally. Specializing in editorial and studio portraiture, Mariah strives to capture real people with honesty and clarity and creates memorable images that tell compelling stories.
Statement: "American Legion" documents the lives of veterans who served our country and are now serving their communities. This work increases public awareness, recognizes member service, and celebrates the veteran community. This project required more than beautiful and lasting images; it necessitated careful ethnographic documentation of our shared history as well as American veteran and small town culture. "American Legion" documents four posts in towns with populations of less than 1,000 across the U.S. The resulting body of work has been compiled into a hardcover monograph and gallery exhibition.
Mike Keaveney
Bio:
Statement:
Ian Kline
Bio: Ian Kline was born in 1994 in York, Pennsylvania. He received his BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2017 and currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Statement: Gazing into a mirror, seeing a fire behind you and not being able to take your eyes of the fire that is tearing everything apart. Staring, staring at the flames reflecting, never turning around.
Melike Koçak
Bio: Melike Koçak was born in 1997, in Istanbul. She's been taking pictures since the age of 13. Now, she studies philosophy in order to work in the philosophy of photography field. Also, she publishes Fabrika Fanzin since 2015, aiming to create a platform for emerging Turkish photographers.
Statement: Melike Koçak tries to capture the brutal,chaotic silence and dream-like moments in daily life.
Ryan Koopmans
Bio: Ryan Koopmans (BA, MFA) is a Canadian/Dutch photographer based in Amsterdam. He was raised on Vancouver Island, Canada, completed his undergraduate education in Vancouver, and in 2012 received a Masters of Fine Art Photography + Video at The School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Statement: Ryan Koopmans’ work explores how the built environment and architecture interacts with nature and how it relates with our lived experiences. He is particularly interested in depicting the world’s megacities with a focus on composition, colour and form. In addition to his architectural photography, his practice includes documentary and commercial projects.
Ilias Lois
Bio: Ilias Lois (b. 1994) is a photographer born and based in Athens, Greece. He studied photography at the Department of Photography & Audiovisual Arts, Athens University of Applied Sciences and at Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia. Since 2014, he has been writing articles in Photographos magazine, addressing contemporary issues. His work has been presented in magazines and group exhibitions in Greece and Italy, including Thessaloniki Museum of Photography (SKG Bridges Festival 2018) and Benaki Museum (Athens Photo Festival 2018).
Statement: “The window seat is perfect,” she says. “You have complete control of the window shade, you can see the view and the horizon from up there. People in aisle seats can’t see the horizon. Maybe, they are used to it. I don’t know what goes wrong with them.” Aisle Seat is a project about the impossibility of viewing the horizon by the residents of the big modern cities. A latent death of human nature. (Currently exhibited in Athens Photo Festival 2018, Benaki Museum)
Carlos Loret de Mola
Bio: Carlos Loret de Mola is a photographer, curator and publisher born in Havana, Cuba and currently based in Hudson, NY. His work has been exhibited at Rayko Photo Center in San Francisco, The Tokyo Institute of Photography, the Center for Photography at Woodstock and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Statement: These images are from various visits to funeral homes over the past few years. They are places with intentions of respect and solace, but they also conjure awkward emotions and uneasy scenarios between persons, both dead and alive, and the home itself. These photographs attempt to evince some of that unavoidable awkward uneasiness.
Noelle McCleaf
Bio: Noelle McCleaf is a photographer exploring themes of memory, relationship, and identity in the southern landscape. Born and raised in Virginia, Noelle received her BFA from the Ringling College of Art and Design, and her MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Her work has been shown in national and international exhibitions. She currently is a Professor of Photography at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida.
Statement: Evie Lou and Laura Jane chronicles the stories and experiences between my mother (Evie Lou) and her best friend (Laura Jane). Evie Lou is a healer and a survivalist whose past life visions awoke her to her true calling: a caretaker for the Earth and those who protect it. Laura Jane is a medical intuitive from the Blackfoot tribe. The fundamental connection they share is their love for the Earth and all things of the Earth.
Alyssa McDonald
Bio: (b. 1993, Vernon, CT) Alyssa McDonald is a New England native and photographic artist based in Boston. She graduated with honors from Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography. She continues to pursue her own photography while working as a photographer's assistant & studio manager. Most recently, she has exhibited her photographs in group shows at ROW DTLA for the Lucie Foundation's Month of Photography Los Angeles, SE Center for Photography in Greenville, South Carolina and Millepiani Exhibition Space in Rome, Italy. She has an upcoming show opening September 7th at Dehn Gallery in Manchester, Connecticut.
Statement: Her photographs are rooted in a realm that is capable of being physical and psychological. It is through her intense observation of landscapes and characters over the course of the seasons and passing of years, that her subject matter is able to parallel the immediate with the infinite. Each composition is steeped with ancestral history, a sincere reverence for place, as well as experiences of wonder and discovery in the natural world. With these symbolic values and narratives in mind, she aims her camera at intertwined histories, origins and fates.
Rob McDonald
Bio: Rob McDonald was a 2014 nominee for the Vienna PhotoBook Prize and won a fellowship in photography from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts the same year. His work has appeared in several monographs, including Cy’s Rollei (with Sally Mann, Nazraeli) and Carolina Writers at Home (Hub City).
Statement: THE FATHER BOX “So many fragments. It comes down to fragments always.” – John Lane Writer John Lane’s father committed suicide in 1959 when John was five years old. A single box holds letters, photos, objects, and papers comprising nearly everything John knows about his father. Two years ago, John gave the box to me and asked me to contemplate its contents through the lens of my camera. These are some of the photographs I made.
Jesse Mervis
Bio: Jesse Mervis is a photographer living and working in Cleveland, Ohio. His work deals with social relationships and family histories, highlighting the places, things and events that punctuate their connections. Specifically, his current projects focus on the presence of divorce, separation and mental disorder in his and his family’s life.
Statement: CALL IT HOW YOU SEE IT is an ongoing recollection of representations of Jesse Mervis’s experience of family separation and bipolar disorder. Beginning in 2008, following a manic episode and subsequent bipolar diagnosis, Mervis began photographing his home life, including his sister’s recovery from a mental breakdown a year later, his father moving out of state, and his mother being forced to sell their home to avoid foreclosure. The series is an effort to confront repressed feelings and reconcile the transitions of a post-divorce nuclear family.
Rafael Milani
Bio: Rafael M. Milani was born in São Paulo, Brazil, in 1989. He began photographing in 2008, and since then has participated in several exhibitions and publications in Brazil and abroad.
Statement: The people from the archipelago of Chiloé (southern Chile) have very unique ways to celebrate their dead, such as the building of house-shaped tombs (often immitading the real house the dead person used to live in), small roadside monuments, and the abundant use of plastic flowers and other trinkets.
Greg Miller
Bio: Greg Miller is an American fine art photographer working in narrative portraiture, often depicting human relationships, using the serendipity of chance meetings with strangers and street photography. Miller’s work has been seen in several solo shows in Los Angeles, Barcelona and the Cheekwood Museum in Nashville, TN as well as group exhibits in New York City, including Yossi Milo, James Danziger and Sasha Wolf Galleries.
Statement: A priest administers ashes to a person’s forehead while uttering some version of the memento mori, “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return.” The ritual observance of Ash Wednesday on the first day of Lent acts as a reminder of the believer’s own finite and imperfect nature. Greg Miller’s own artistic ritual, returning to New York City year after year to photograph Ash Wednesday, has made this series personally sacred.
Azikiwe Mohammed
Bio: Azikiwe Mohammed graduated from Bard College in 2005 where he studied photography and fine arts. Since then he has shown these things in galleries both nationally and internationally. In 2015 he received the Art Matters Grant, and in 2016 was the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emmerging Artist Grant. He lives in New York and works at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City.
Statement: Azikiwe Mohammed investigates site and location to further explore how time effects memory, especially the memories that we can’t seem to shake. By photographing the same place time and time again, do we change the original memory by injecting new ones into the same dialogue?
Abelardo Morell
Bio: Abelardo Morell was born in Havana, Cuba in 1948. He immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1962. Morell received his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College and his MFA from The Yale University School of Art. He has received an honorary degree from Bowdoin College in 1997 and from Lesley University in 2014. He has received a number of awards and grants, which include a Guggenheim fellowship in 1994 and an Infinity Award in Art from ICP in 2011. In November 2017, he received a Lucie Award for achievement in fine art.
Statement:
Lisa McElaney and I have been together since we were 20 and 28, respectively. My relationship with her is at the core of my life as a man and as an artist. Our love for each other – in all kinds of weather – grounds my resolve to be hopeful and vital, even when I may feel challenged to do so. She is always my first audience and I count on her eyes to see things that I may not, sometimes.
A couple of years ago, for her birthday, I made Lisa a picture of flowers – it felt more enduring than actual flowers. In creating that image, I had no idea a series would follow. However, something in the making of that first photograph gave me a newly found spark to experiment in ways I had not done before.
Technically, these images involve a number of approaches such as making multiple exposures to create floral explosions; combining my own painting with living bouquets and using ink to produce dense cliché verre (glass plate) pictures. Since I believe that new possibilities in art are always around the corner these works have been giving me plenty of opportunities to prove that to myself again and again. At the same time, they serve an emotional impulse to show the woman I share my life with my dedication to her.
Colleen Mullins
Bio: Colleen Mullins has received four Minnesota State Arts Board Grants, and two McKnight Artist Fellowships. Her photographs are in numerous collections including the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and Southeast Museum of Photography, and her artist books are in the collections of The Center for Creative Photography, Dickson Art Center at UCLA, and Yale University, among others. She has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center and Penland School of Crafts' Winter Residency.
Statement: This work is a poem about removal. It is about the planned disassembly of the William McKinley statue in Arcata, California. Employing re-photographed historic imagery, interviews, social histories, news clippings and my photographs, it weaves together an examination of the issue of monument removal in the United States, and points out the frequent absence of fact in an emotionally cause-driven era, that may usher in the death of memory of the ill-acts of our forbearers.
Julianne Nash
Bio: Julianne Nash (b. 1991, Massachusetts) is a New York City based photographer. She recently received her MFA in Photography Video and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts, where was awarded the Assistantship Scholarship for two consecutive years. Julianne received her BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design with Departmental Honors in 2013. Julianne's work has most notably been exhibited in the Flash Forward Festival and Photographic Recourse Center in Boston, MA. She has been been published in Aint-Bad Magazine and has self published an handmade artist book of her work, Agglomeration. Julianne is a recipient of the 2018 School of Visual Arts Alumni Scholarship. A selection of Julianne's images may be purchased through Areté Gallery's Flat File Program in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Statement: These images are apart of a larger series, Agglomeration, in which I contend with not only my fears of inheriting my Grandmothers degenerative (and hereditary) from of vision loss; but also a deeply personal process of mourning the loss of two of the most intrinsic people in my life. By documenting floral arrangements as they die, I am able to mimic the feeling of watching them pass over time (in a much more beautiful way!)
Ivan Navarro
Bio: Freelance photographer. He specially like photo-reportage & editorial photography; he has published in newspapers and magazines such as El País, Rockdelux or MIA. He makes photoreportages at short and long term, at his own interest or commissioned. He combines his professional activity as a photographer with teaching; he has taught at different schools and city council programs. In 2017 he found the documentary photography Collective 19, with the aim to develop group projects.
Statement: The center of interest in his work is in the small things, in the minimal, intimate stories; he is focused in projects at medium and long term with the intention of understanding the subject he faces.
Erin Neve
Bio: Erin Neve is a photographic artist based in the greater Washington DC area. Erin received her MFA in photography from The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2012. She received her MA in philosophy in 2006 where she focused her research on Aesthetics and Photographic Theory. Her work has been exhibited nationally in Minneapolis, Chicago, Austin, and San Antonio as well as internationally in Beijing, China and Turku, Finland. Erin is currently Assistant Professor of Photography at Shepherd University.
Statement: This work explores the Body as expressed in traditional religious (Catholic) dialogue and symbolic notions of its death, transformation, and affectations. Images in these series show sanctified materials used as bodily relics -- altar bread (communion wafers) built into towers, and photographic imprints of sanctified ashes and oils used in Ash Wednesday ceremonies.
My Le Nguyen
Bio: My Le was born in Vietnam, and came to Canada with her mother and brother. She took several photography classes in high school, and it has since been like a close friend to her. She discovered that she can see things differently, and it allowed her to explore this nagging, indescribable, hovering thought of why we exist. It just seemed so utterly meaningless.
Statement: My Le is fascinated by the notion of death. She can't begin to grasp the concept of striving to be better to only die in the end. What she is interested in, is the period before death, such as old age. What must the thoughts of those who know death is impending? Her work, The Great Outdoors explores this concept. My Le used to be a Registered nurse who visited this nursing home and photographed the hallways of the residents there.
Drew Nikonowicz
Bio: Drew Nikonowicz (born in St. Louis Missouri, 1993) earned a BFA degree from the University of Missouri - Columbia in 2016. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally. In 2015 he received the Aperture Portfolio Prize and the Lenscratch Student Prize. Nikonowicz completed a one-year residency at Fabrica Research Centre in 2017, and now lives and works in the United States in Saint Louis, Missouri.
Statement: I am working on a new project which explores the relationship between certainty, faith, and technology. In relation to Death, it seems that 'the end' is not a scientific moment to be determined, but rather the moment when someone else learns about it. If hundreds of people believe 'extinct' creatures still roam the forests in secrecy, are they truly dead?
Yael Nov
Bio: Yael Nov grew up in Seattle and now lives and works in Los Angeles. After completing her BFA and BA at University of Washington, Yael received her MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.
Statement: Working in images and sculpture, Yael Nov examines the inextricable ties between fragility and strength, blurring the lines between them. Informed by her family's history landscape, memory, and the body become sites for this examination of opposing forces.
Samantha Otto
Bio: Samantha Otto is a photographer based out of Detroit, MI. Graduating from the College for Creative Studies in 2015 with a BFA in photography. Shooting predominantly documentary, Samantha captures the everyday human condition. Samantha has shown in NYC in the 2017 Photoville exhibition as a fellow with Facing Change: Documenting Detroit.
Statement: As an individual Samantha has always been interested in the human condition. She is drawn to want to understand how we all function as individuals and in society. Being fascinated by how we are all so different weather it be the psychology, culture or biology of a human. As a photographer Samantha feels by photographing and meeting different people it helps her understand how similar we are, but also how different our worlds can be. Being behind the camera is Samantha's opportunities to try to help others see the beauty in the hardships of life, whether it be her own or the lives of others.
Tim Pearse
Bio: Timothy Pearse is an award winning fine art and portrait photographer based in Bristol, UK, and specialises in alternative and experimental photographic processes.
Statement: Pearse's artistic practice takes a number of different positions within relation to the wider photographic community. These positions deal with his thoughts regarding the current trends within photographic production and aesthetics, as well as with his viewpoints on more abstract notions concerning issues derived from theoretical research. The making of his photographs is a combination of an outward facing, research-lead methodology that is driven by philosophical and scientific reading, combined with practical experimentation with historic and antiquarian imaging processes, and an introspective visual development process which references theology, myth, the occult, and science fiction.
Alexandra Rafael Martínez
Bio: Alexandra Rafael Martínez (b. 1990 San Juan, PR) received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design before basing herself in Brooklyn, NY. In 2013, Humble Arts Foundation awarded her the New Photography Grant. Alexandra’s work has been exhibited in Johannes Vogt and Invisible-Exports, New York; Carroll & Sons, Boston; Granoff Center for the Creative Arts and RISD Museum of Art, Providence; Campos de Gutiérrez, Colombia; and Santurce es Ley in Puerto Rico.
Statement: Alexandra Rafael Martínez uses sculpture, photography, and other media to explore the complex relationships between life and death, spirit and matter, transience and transformation. her most recent work includes “We Who Are About to Die,” an archive of Alexandra's contemporaries with each pre-mortem portrait being portraying each artist's response to the question: “If you died today, how would you want to be remembered?" “Martínez in Mourning” portrays the women in Alexandra’s family in mourning. Individual and group portraits consider the personal yet shared experiences of love and loss across generations.
Jennifer Ray
Bio: Jennifer Ray’s work is in the public collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Museo del Barro, the Fundación Bienal Asunción, and the Kinsey Institute. It was selected for the Asunción Biennial (Paraguay) and Bienal de Curitiba (Brazil), and has been exhibited at the RISD Museum of Art, the Chelsea Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Hyde Park Art Center, and Chicago Cultural Center, among other venues.
Statement: At its surface, Jennifer Ray’s work is a documentation of objects found at open shooting ranges - improvised targets that have been abandoned, leaving traces of their previous owners. She treats these objects as sculptural material, photographing them on-site as if in the studio, and using lighting to assert particular narratives. Drawing on the real as well as the implied, this work connects the present fact to the histories of violence in the US.
Kiera Renz
Bio: Kiera Renz was born and raised in New York, where she currently resides. She holds a BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her work revolves around strong familial ties as well as a curiosity with a landscape that feels constantly rejecting, and how the two correlate.
Statement: My photographs revolve around the sense of placelessness I feel where I reside. The work is inspired by the discomforting landscape that I observe, and creates a fractured sense of said place. With these images I am depicting a sense of loss of place which affects me and the people around me. Through the image-making process I am searching for the source of this rupture, and attempting to resolve it within myself.
Ivan Riascos
Bio: Ivan Riascos is an interdisciplinary visual artist, and curator raised in Central Florida. His interest in photography and its role in history to create specific perspectives is one of the driving forces in his artwork. As an artist he considers himself a diarist, and an anthropologist, who uses various mediums to address issues of identity, religion, family, memories, perception, and relationships, with the intention of starting discussions on how we relate as a society as a whole, or within sub-cultures, and/or as individuals. In his spare time he loves to delve into theory and conceptual thinking. He earned his BFA degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a MFA degree at The University of Central Florida.
Statement: My mother said to me when waking from a deep slumber, “I dream of sleeping.” She then laughed after she said this. Many of us will witness our parent’s health slowly degrade, they will sleep more often eventually never waking from their sleep. This photograph is from a series that features my angst foreshadowing of the day that will eventually come.
Ken Rosenthal
Bio: Rosenthal’s artwork is represented by Klompching Gallery; Etherton Gallery; Gerald Peters Gallery; Dolby Chadwick Gallery. Collections include George Eastman Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Art Institute of Chicago; National Portrait Gallery, London; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego. His work will be featured in a four person exhibition, Shots In The Dark, opening December 2018 at the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe.
Statement: While The Forest is a series of landscapes made in a specific locale, the essence of the work is neither about landscape nor the region. The landscapes function metaphorically for internal physical and psychological states. What began as an exploration of a land Rosenthal was intimately familiar with ultimately came to reflect upon elements of his very being that he was less attuned to. The images are interwoven with thoughts on mortality, discovery, loss & renewal.
Will Russack
Bio: Will Russack is a photographer currently based in Seattle. He recently received his B.S in Environmental Studies from Tufts University and his B.F.A in Photography from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Drawing on this cross-disciplinary approach, Will’s photographs address mankind’s paradoxical relationship with the natural world. Most recently, Will has exhibited at the Abigail Ogilvy Gallery in Boston and the Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle.
Statement: These images come from an ongoing project that explores the weight of family history and genetic predisposition to certain behaviors and disorders. With the unexpected death of my uncle two years ago, I began to dissect the feeling of inescapability that hovers over conditions such as depression and substance abuse, the complex relationships and expectations within my own family, and the silence that too often accompanies these stories.
Christine Schiavo
Bio: CHRISTINE SCHIAVO is a NYC born and based multi-media artist working in photography, film, installation and sound creating visual rumpuses’ and media mash-ups to form her unique and inspired work. She often employs her beloved city as inspiration and source for both an ongoing fictional, and non-fictional journal of the physical, psychological and dreamlifes of her daily wanderings and interactions in NYC. She loves experimentation - keeping it bold, surreal and infinitely evolving. Schiavo’s work is in noted collections and publications including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY and the Museum of Modern Art, NY, She has been awarded a NYFA, NYSCA, multiple artist residencies and other fellowships for her work. She recently completed “ The Passenger “ and “ Resident Tourist “; two gritty, lyrical and hyper-real experimental cellphone-ography projects based on the fractured narratives and glimpses of ghosts of NYC subways, trains and ferry systems.
Statement: I am a storyteller and world builder. My work is based on gleanings from my waking and dreamlife through a continuously evolving, multi-media journal built tightly upon our culture, its environments and the sights and sounds of its daily minutia. To create my images, I often construct site-specific hyper-realities and tableaus within existing environments using paint, props, projections, painting fake shadows and light and live presences to create lyrical and eerie tensions within our knowledge of the familiar. I mostly choose not to use digital sources or postproduction, using analogue film and antiquated photo processes instead to achieve strikingly original images and ‘accidents’, with the exception of a current series of experimental cellphoneography work in which I defiantly challenge the “ Smartphone Gentrification” of photographic images by physically altering the phone, messing up the lens and technical functions or tossing it through the air. ( it’s a Love/ Hate thing ;). Presently, I am ‘ building ‘ large-scale photographs by quilting, stapling and taping together paper photographs together and drawing on and scratching into them.
Geralyn Shukwit
Bio: Geralyn Shukwit is a photographer straddling the line between photojournalism and fine art. For years she has traveled to South America and Caribbean where she intimately photographs people in their daily life, embracing their resilience and strength.
Keith Sirchio
Bio: Keith Sirchio moved to New York to study cinematography at the School of Visual Arts. After working in the field on music videos and independent films, he found himself more intrigued taking stills of what was happening behind the scenes. He has since interned at Magnum Photos, been chosen for a residency program at the Camera Club of New York and is currently working on a variety of personal projects.
Statement: Keith uses the camera to explore and find moments that delineate individuals against their surroundings. He see's the world as a documentary film; an infinite narrative with vast subplots in which he aims to chronicle what happens “between the takes”; the unguarded truths that reveal themselves when introspection rises to the surface and exposes a fleeting vulnerability in man and environment.
Marie Smith
Bio: Marie Smith was born and raised in London, she uses the canon of memory to address the complexities of her diaspora identity as 2nd generation Afro-Caribbean. Smith's personal experiences are used to facilitate questions around identity, death and mental health. Smith seeks to re-frame the context of her diaspora identity. For Smith, it is essential to create a distinct and honest appraisal; abstracting her gaze to create her version of the surroundings she inhabits.
Statement: Marie Smith practice engages with film photography, Smith's initial concerns and curiosity can be seen in her ongoing series Observations on Film, which documents still life's and the architectural juxtapositions that occur in complex landscapes of London and rest of UK. Smith always carries a camera with her, therefore she is forced to be aware of the context of the environment that she inhabits that have become part of the fabric of her identity.
Joey Solomon
Bio: (b. 1997) Much of Joey Solomon's content explores the eerie personhood of mankind’s mistakes. Solomon pulls much of his perspective from personal entanglements in recurring themes of familial loyalty, queer self view and the erosion of our Earth. If nothing else, his work serves to affirm a learning process of our tender, dysfunctional species. Solomon is currently in his last year of undergraduate study at the Department of Photography & Imaging at New York University.
Statement: The images are selections from a pool of new work titled ‘Blood Draw’, a response to the artist’s 3 month time in the hospital due to a tumor and the mental rehabilitations resulting from having one’s life risked. Photographs of hidden family members exemplify a climactic time of interwoven dynamics and a closing of bonds through unexpected hardship. The images force Solomon to ask; Will he walk again? Will he survive? What lies beyond?
Stu Sontier
Bio: Born in England in 1959, Stu Sontier has lived in Dunedin and Auckland, New Zealand since age 8. After a break from years of darkroom and documentary work, he now uses digital tools, often using unconventional capture or printing methods. "Uncertainty plays a large role in my work, both in methodology and content."
Statement: When questions like "why are we here", "what happens after death", "what makes the universe work" are asked, Sontier dwells on the layers of uncertainty involved in looking for answers. In the series 'Collapse' he is interested in a reference both to environmental collapse and existential ideas that arise from interpretations of quantum physics.
Rachel Stern
Bio: Rachel Stern (b. 1989, NYC) is a photographer whose work challenges conventions of beauty and promotes escapist, constructivist fantasy. Her work images a world that might be, built out of the world that is. It is a kitsch paradise, a queer-washed history, and an attempt at hope. She received her BFA in Photography and the History of Art and Visual Culture in 2011 from the Rhode Island School of Design, attended Skowhegan in 2014, and graduated from Columbia University in 2016 with an MFA in Visual Arts. Her work has been featured in BOMB, ArtFCity, Hyperallergic, and Matte Magazine.
Statement: In my work, I create a limbo of unreserved opulence and overwhelming reality where most real things are fake and all fake things are real. I invite my audience to peer into the proscenium, encounter a facsimile wonderland, and begin to wittingly play along. The colliding roles of gender, kitsch, history, and the dramatic banal, leave questions of authenticity always hanging in the balance. Using photography, installation, performance, or video, I satisfy a dire need for my own new reality.
Lawrence Sumulong
Bio: Lawrence Sumulong (b. 1987) is a Filipino American photographer and Photo Editor based in New York City with his partner, Sarah, and their two beloved cats, Oliver and Miko.
Statement: These are screen grabs of anonymous, viral web images of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines. The files were then processed on expired polaroid film. The images are some of the 34 butchered journalists in the still unresolved Maguindanao Massacre of 2009. In retrospect, perhaps this grotesque event marked the watershed moment in which violence and murder became acceptable.
Stephanie Taiber
Bio: Stephanie Taiber resides in Chicago, IL. She received a BFA from the University of Arizona. As an artist, Stephanie creates visual connections between emotions and moments, exploring the tension between internal and external constructs of female identity. Influenced by Virginia Woolf, Stephanie’s work has been exhibited widely receiving several juror’s awards and is itself narrative in nature while remaining suggestive and minimal. A 2017 Finalist for the Summer Fresh Exhibition at Klompching Gallery in New York, Stephanie was recently named one of the 2018 Review Santa Fe 100 Photographers.
Statement: Ethel; seen and shaped by the perception of others, defined by the needs and desires of others, tethered to the reality and history of others. The temporal nature of our time clearly articulated by her presence. Now, inside the stillness of her absence there is subtle evidence of life persevering where it seems most unlikely to survive. Her surroundings quickly settle as she dissolves into them. There is a period of having lived, that when you look back as if it was a thing, it remains, here, still, a life.
Lex Thompson
Bio: Lex Thompson obtained a BA in History at New College, Florida and a MA in Religion and Art at Yale, and his MFA in Photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. He is Professor of Art at Bethel University, MN, a 2010 McKnight Artist Fellow for Photography, a 2008, 2011, 2016 & 2018 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant recipient , a 2009 Flash Forward Emerging Photographer and shortlisted for the 2014 Source-Cord Prize.
Statement: Though I made this in Minnesota, just down the street from my house, it reminds me of growing up in the South – there’s something just a little southern gothic about it.
Jose David Valiente
Bio: José David Valiente (1986) is a documentary and fine art photographer based in Murcia, Spain. He studied Audiovisual Image and then continued with Artistic Photography at Murcia School of Arts. . Valiente's work has been featured in various online publications including British Journal of Photography, Fisheye Magazine, Aint-Bad and Der Greif and he was selected by British Journal of Photography as one of their annual "Ones To Watch”.
Statement: José is powerfully drawn to decadence, marginals, bizarre, wild and mystery. His work is very personal. It reflects the environment around him and he makes use of its elements to portray himself.
Tristan Wheelock
Bio: Tristan Wheelock is a Florida based freelance photographer who specializes in documentary, travel and portraiture. He discovered photography shortly after college during an assignment that had him crossing the U.S. while living in a van with a street magician. Serendipity led him to India and he's been traveling ever since.
Statement: I shot these images with my iPhone during my time at the Cleveland Clinic caring for my best friend. He suffered from Cystic Fibrosis and as result needed to have a lung transplant. A rare set of circumstances led to him waking up paralyzed from the neck down and unable to speak. He held on for months in bed but eventually decided to withdraw care.This work was a way for me to process the situation and eventually the loss.
Mikayla Whitmore
Bio: Mikayla Whitmore, Las Vegas Native and UNLV graduate, has exhibited at multiple venues including P3Studio at the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas, Contemporary Arts Center, and the Marjorie Barrick Museum. Her work explores the potential of the photographic image in an attempt to explore the way memory functions. During her solo residency ‘When the Night Comes’ she functioned as a archivist of memories seeking to re-order phantasmal visual instances in time. Using overlooked objects to create an installation to create a lucid mindscape corrupting memories over the course of a month. She currently balances her studio practice with work as a staff photographer, researching dinosaur species, and planting succulents.
Statement: These images are individual and not part of a series.