group show 63:
Love, Actually
About the Artists

Isabella Agbaje is a conceptual photographer who picked the lens when her eyes began to capture. She hails from Lagos, Nigeria and completed her undergraduate studies in Northeastern Uni, Boston, USA. Her motto remains that there is beauty in the ordinary and she's more focused on processes rather than the final. As they say, the journey makes the destination. Lastly, she's fixated on documenting the authenticity of Nigerian streetlife; it holds fascination for the world.

Initially trained as a commercial photographer, Ashley Allen committed herself to the fine art of photography some months after her son turned 1 year old. It was after that immersive first year that family and self forged a new meaning. Through feelings of paralyzing love and fearing the inability to live up to the roles of wife, mother, woman, her photographs explore her personal identity as it relates to these intimate relationships. 

Keliy Anderson-Staley’s work has been exhibited at the Akron Museum of Art, BronxMuseum of Art, NationalPortrait Gallery of the Smithsonian, Ogden Museum, SFO Museum, and Southeast Museum of Photography, and her work is in the collections of the Library of Congress, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Portland Museum of Art. Her book of tintype portraits, On a Wet Bough is available from Waltz Books. 

Lanna Apisukh is an American photographer based in New York City working in portrait and documentary photography. With a background in skateboarding and an extensive athletic career as a former Division I elite gymnast, she is drawn to active and unique individuals walking their own path. Her work explores identity, individuality and place through bold and honest stories she strives to create in her images.  Lanna is a Bachelor of Arts graduate of the University of Washington and has expanded on her photo education at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her subjects span from TV personalities, athletes and CEOs to artists, designers, everyday people and their surroundings. 

Ryan Baker is a New York-based portrait photographer and a graduate of Emerson College.

Chris Behroozian is a photographer focused on portraiture that investigates connection in modern life. Through his work Chris explores tensions within religion, sexuality and intimacy. His process is rooted in an inner journey he takes with each subject, working quietly and deliberately to move past his social anxiety to connect with his subjects. His work has helped him explore the intersections of his own identity, looking to his past to inform his future as an artist. 

Chris Berntsen is a New York based artist who uses photography to explore themes related to queerness, identity, and intimacy.  Chris’ work has been exhibited in MoMA PS1, Aperture Foundation, New York, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans.  He received his BFA from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and is a candidate for an MFA from Hunter College in New York. 

Carla Borel is a London based photographer, born in Paris and raised in Las Vegas and a Hampshire village. Her personal work focuses mainly on portraiture and addresses themes of transience, identity, community, isolation and loneliness. She is most well known for her Stillsoho project, a series of black and white portraits of friends and lovers set in the landscape of a disappearing London.

Frances Bukovsky is a documentary photographer who's work focuses on the day to day challenges of life with chronic illness. She received a BFA in Photography and Imaging in 2018 from Ringling College and now works on long term projects to raise awareness for illnesses such as Endometriosis and Autoimmune disease.

Carloman Macidiano Céspedes Riojas (born 1981) is a Peruvian photographer who lives in Buenos Aires. Argentina. He studied Communication Sciences and is a graduate of the Argentine School of Photography. Carlo creates images that, according to him, are inspired by real events in his life and his daily environment, and also deals with a diverse photography, from landscapes, trips, streets, documentary and conceptual. His work has won several awards, including Peruvian National Awards, 2015 and 2017 Sony World Photography Awards.

Ali Kate Cherkis Born in NYC in 1987 and raised in Western Massachusetts, Ali now resides in Brooklyn with her dog Felix Cherkis. Ali received her BA from Pitzer College, studied at ICP, and, as a "mature student," received her MA from Goldsmiths University. Ali is an Aries, and her Venus is in Aquarius.

Barbara and Lindsay Ciurej and Lochman have been collaborating on photographic projects for four decades. Their work chronicles the confluence of history, myth and popular culture as these forces shape our understanding of ourselves.  They have exhibited work in the US and internationally. Their photographs are in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Photography; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Yale Center for British Art; Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, WA.

Troy Colby was born in rural Kansas in 1975 and currently lives in Lawrence, Kansas. His work and research explores the delicate balance of family, fatherhood and the outcome of the family photo album. Motivated by intellectual and psychological inquiry of these intimate topics, Troy photographs his own family as a means of understanding the emotional qualities that come along with fatherhood. It has become his means of understanding while creating an honest interpretation of the idealized family album.

Peter Currie (b. 1991) is a Canadian photographer based in Montreal, Quebec. Currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography at Concordia University, his work focuses on the built environment, and the transformations taking place within the urban landscape.

Jane Waggoner Deschner is a mixed media artist based in Montana. She earned degrees in geography at the University of Kansas and, later, in art at Montana State University–Billings (BA) and Vermont College of Fine Arts (MFA). She exhibits actively and has been awarded artist residencies/fellowships nationwide. Her dayjobs include exhibition installer, graphic designer, photographer, instructor, curator and picture framer.

Jess T. Dugan is an artist whose work explores issues of identity, gender, sexuality, and community through photographic portraiture. She received her MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago (2014), her Master of Liberal Arts in Museum Studies from Harvard University (2010), and her BFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2007).

Dugan’s monographs include To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults (Kehrer Verlag, 2018) and Every Breath We Drew (Daylight Books, 2015). Dugan is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, an ICP Infinity Award, and was selected by the Obama White House as a 2015 Champion of Change.

She teaches workshops at venues including the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, CO, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and Filter Photo in Chicago, IL. In 2015, Dugan founded the Strange Fire Artist Collective to highlight work made by women, people of color, and LGBTQ artists. She is represented by the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago, IL.

Brandon Dunning is a photographer based in the Southern Massachusetts and Rhode Island area. Graduating with a BFA in Design/ Photography from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He currently works at Panopticon Imaging in Rockland, MA as a photo editor and fine art printer. Brandon’s work is mostly in digital format but also works in film format. 

Kristen Emack is a photographer and educator who lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She holds a degree in Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She is primarily a self-taught photographer.

In 2019 Kristen won 2nd place in the CAA National Prize Show, curated by Steve Locke and Camilo Alvarez, and is a recipient of this year’s Mass Cultural Council's Photography Fellowship grant. She is a CRITICAL MASS Top 50 Finalist and a Michael Reichmann Project Grant recipient.

Kristen's work includes two long-term projects that look at childhood, family and visibility.

Lauren Grabelle 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.

Living in Cincinnati with her son and partner, Nikita Gross works as a full time photographer and artist. For Nikita, the act of creating is just as important as the creation itself. Delved in mystery and mysticism her work attempts to explain the unexplainable. She is continually pushing conventional photographic boundaries, exploring new ways to express her vision via alternative techniques and film manipulation.

Kim Guthrie, who is represented by TW Fine Art, Brisbane, studied Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts, graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. He lives on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast with his wife, painter, Lisa Adams. His practice concentrates on photography.   Kim exhibited the RIVER’S EDGE series at the USC Art Gallery in 2019; included in EXCHANGE VALUE of selected national and international photography at QUT Art Museum 2019.   A 2019 and 2018 finalist in the Sunshine Coast Art Prize; Guthrie was previously included in the exhibition GOMA:Q CONTEMPORARY QUEENSLAND ART 2015 at QAGOMA, South Brisbane; 2015 Josephine Ulrich & Win Schubert Photography Award; Moran Contemporary Photography Prize 2014 & 2013 and twice finalist in the Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture. Guthrie writes:   “It’s my job to report back to the general population on the cultural landscape as I see it. As much of my subject matter deals with the Australian national character and Australian landscapes etc., I believe that, for the audience, there will be a strong recognition-factor at work. The work transcends mere documentary photography and presents the 'everyday' within a high-art context.”

Samuel Harris lives in Columbus, Ohio and has been photographing the mundane and often dismissed aspects of his environment for over 4 years now. The subjects of his photos are usually of the banal and disparate – shadows, reflections, debris, etc.

Jacob Haupt is an artist. Like George Lucas, he was born in Modesto, California. Jacob currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. 

Max Hirshfeld was born in North Carolina in 1951. His work has been shown at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Kreeger Museum and is represented by leading galleries in Washington, DC and Boston. He has won silver and bronze awards from the Prix de la Photographie Paris and has been featured in both Communication Arts and American Photography. Hirshfeld’s editorial work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, Time, Vanity Fair, and other national publications, and his advertising work has been showcased in campaigns for American Airlines, Amtrak, Canon and IBM, among others. Sweet Noise: Love in Wartime, his first book, tells his parents' story before, during, and after the Holocaust, a subject difficult to grasp and almost impossible to document. It is also a story of love in a time of war, told in a clear voice using compelling black-and-white photographs and simple, evocative language to build a framework around this pivotal moment in history.

Harrison Huse (b. 1997) is a fine art photographer based in Chicago, Illinois. Harrison's body of work surrounds LGBT themes through portraiture. He is currently obtaining his bachelor's degree in photography at Columbia College Chicago.

Hanna Jarzabek finished a Master degree in Political Science (University of Geneva) and since 2008 she is based in Spain where she works as a freelance photojournalist. She has published in BuzzFeed News, XL Semanal, L'Obs, Equal Times, 5W magazine, Interviú, El Periódico de Cataluña, 7k magazine, Gazeta Wyborcza and Polityka among others. Her projects address discrimination and societal dysfunctions in western society, with emphasis on the issues of gender identity and sexual diversity. 

Eirik Johnson has exhibited his work at institutions including the Aperture Foundation, the ICA Boston, the Henry Art Gallery, and the George Eastman House.  His monographs include PINE (Minor Matters),  Barrow Cabins (Ice Fog Press), Sawdust Mountain (Aperture), and BORDERLANDS (Twin Palms).  Johnson’s work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Rachel Jump was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1991. She received her BFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014. Her photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally, which includes Unseen Amsterdam Festival in The Netherlands, Filter Photo in Chicago, and dnj Gallery in Los Angeles. Her prints are held in collections at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the RISD Museum, in addition to private collections. Rachel’s work has also been featured in various print and online publications, including DIE ZEIT, i-D Germany, Der Greif, The Photo Review, FotoRoom, Museé Magazine, and Fisheye Magazine. In 2018, FotoRoom named her as one of “Ten Female Photographers You Should Know”, and was also the winner of the FotoRoom OPEN: Format Edition Prize. 

Ayesha Kazim is a fine-art and documentary photographer currently working towards a BA in Photography and Imaging at NYU. With her intended career path in photojournalism, Ayesha’s central aim is to link her interests in photography, the humanities, and the social sciences to cultivate a more objective world view and redefine the processes in which current events are delivered and depicted. 

Walking through parallel, waves of disconnections, singularities inside idiosyncratic corners. Caio Kenji’s photography or poetry invites the viewer to debate, to explore the questionings along with the author, with no cemented statements but conversations between the awaken state and dreams,  the city and the self, the unconsciousness and the sound. The fury is mixed with sweetness, memories that don’t belong to anyone reflecting wishes of freedom and bridges to connect all beings and open hearted emotions. Beauty and pain are not detached in Caio’s work, they are like dancing lines going to a very similar point, and on the way, sometimes the distance between them is wider, sometimes they get so close that they overlay each other, and mostly the signs of whom is overshadowing the other is very subtle.

Sydney King is an artist working primarily in large format photography. Her work explores methods of unlearning photographic vision through intervening with the way the camera takes in light. Her work has been shown at the ICP Museum, the Dean Collection, Chashama, Site:Brooklyn, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and others. She attended the Yale School of Art Norfolk Residency in 2016 and recently completed a fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. 

Michael Koch was born 1973 in Braunschweig, he lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.  He studied communication design, art and photography and history of photography in Essen, at Folkwang University, from 1998 to 2004 (Diploma). His photographic work is exhibited internationally.

Daniela Leal (b. Miami, FL 1995) graduated from Loyola University New Orleans. She lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana as an assistant to filmmaker Garrett Bradley, a bread baker, and a freelancer. Her work suggests that our ability to love and be loved is informed by our perceptions of the many relationships we hold, and defines how we move through space and time.

After studying languages, Elsa Leydier 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.Elsa Leydier was a laureate in 2019 of the Dior Photography Award for Young Talents and for the Ruinart / Paris Photo Prize. She was a finalist for the HSBC Prize in 2018. Her work has been shown in several exhibitions 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), among others, and in solo shows in Bogotá (Colombia), San Francisco (US), and Paris and Lyon (France). She is represented by Intervalle gallery, Paris.

Joseph Liatela is a transdisciplinary artist based in New York City. Through a transgender lens, his work examines the institutional, cultural, and medico-legal notions of what is considered a “complete” or “correct” bodily formation. Using performance, sculpture, and photography, he makes work that examines issues of gender representation, biopolitics, and questions of authenticity. His work has been shown nationally and internationally, and he is currently an MFA candidate in New Genres at Columbia University. 

Michelle Loukidis approaches much of her work as an extension of self, a kind of unconscious self portrait, most of her subjects are people and places she knows. Working with portraiture and landscape, her images have a timeless connection to the subjects. Most of her images deal with very personal aspects of her life and belief systems. She uses black and white as it transforms the image into something that we can’t just see with our eyes, we know we are looking at a construct of reality.

Marlike Marks is an autonomous photographer based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She graduated with honours from the Dutch Academy of Image Creation. Love is the main focus in her work. In a period of heartbreak her camera was her anchor and through photography she unravels her questions about life and love. Marlike works on film and her honest approach results in intimate images of private, daily moments.

Fabrice Mbonankira is a photographer of weddings and other works, who is currently developing a passion for author photography.

Rachael McArthur is a lens based artist currently living in Brooklyn, New York. She centres her work around the themes of the female experience, body and sexuality. She uses her often unsettling images to explore the cultural ideas of feminine beauty and the objectification of women. Her work ranges from video, performance, sculpture and photography. Using the push and pull of dominance and submission, her most current work explores female sexuality within the kink and BDSM community.

Biologist and artist Daniel Meinhardt uses photography and illustration to integrate science with social and environmental issues it can help to illuminate. From years researching and teaching biology he learned that misunderstandings of human anatomy and development often hinder people's ability to see gender as the complex, social construct it is. Such misunderstandings are ultimately human, not scientific, problems, so he uses art to educate and inspire action on various social and environmental issues.

Celeste Midori is a self taught, interdisciplinary artist based in Montreal. Her current practice is grounded in analog processes with a significant focus on portraiture. Her work revolves around the intersections between connectivity, queerness, both platonic and romantic forms of love, healing, empathy, and vulnerability. Aided by the photographic medium, she explores the emotional weight of imagery and the potential to visually convey a story or a feeling to an audience. 

Minh Ngoc Nguyen (b. 1992) is a photographer based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He holds an MFA from Valand Academy (Gothenburg, Sweden) and graduated in 2018. His work at large concerns the idea of fabrication, both outside and within the photographic sphere while emphasising the medium’s perceived functionalities. 

Federico Possati was born in Italy in 1988. In 2016 he graduated from Columbia University in Film and Media Studies. During the program he got close to the photography department, where he worked as a TA and darkroom monitor for his staying in school. After moving in New York in 2012, he has been working as a freelance photographer, filmmaker and video editor, collaborating to various independent productions and on personal projects.

Julia Raite is a photographer and independent curator on a mission to empower emerging artists, advocate for viable careers in the arts, and make art more accessible and present in daily life. 

Harry Rose is a photographer, producer and editor living and working in East London. Harry focuses on telling unexpected stories from people who believe in Bigfoot to work on Queer life. Currently working on a long form body of work exploring the community and people involved with the world of Star Wars. Producing several volumes that tap into the enduring legacy of the franchise and how it holds a special place in peoples hearts. Harry has helped launched creative content studios to help support photographers and is currently re launching Darwin Magazine, an online platform for photography which was in print from 2011-2014.

Ren Rox is an analogue photographer shooting in a variety of fields including fashion, music and travel. Her bold, psychedelic atmospheres are achieved using in-camera experimentation and other chemical techniques on 35mm film.

As an openly gay and disabled man, Joey Solomon’s artistic work hones in on the psychology of self and other humans through portrait studies and darkroom accidents using the lens as his medium. Solomon pulls much of his work perspective from personal entanglements in recurring themes of mental and physical illness. His images continue to document motifs surrounding familial shared illness, queer self view and the erosion of our Earth. If nothing else, Solomon’s work serves to affirm a learning process of our tender and dysfunctional species. In May of 2019, Joey Solomon earned his BFA in Photography & Imaging from NYU’s Tisch School of The Arts. Prints of Solomon’s have been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. Solomon is currently working as a photography assistant and archivist for Jeffrey Henson Scales. 

Rylan Steele is a large format photographer and professor of photography in Columbus, Georgia. He is a fan of Hugh Grant, obviously, but prefers Two Weeks Notice to Love Actually.   

Christina Thurston is an artist who works in photography, video and poetry. Thurston graduated with her Masters in Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in 2019 and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 2009. Her work has been exhibited in the United States as well as internationally in Athens, Copenhagen and Tokyo. Thurston currently lives and works in New York City.

Alexis Vasilikos (b.1977) is an Athens-based visual artist who works primarily with photography. His work revolves around peripatetic photography, meditation and energetic editing and is deeply influenced by Eastern mysticism, in particular by the teachings of Advaita Vedanta and Zen Buddhism. He studied photography in Athens, at Focus and A.k.t.o. and attended  the Art History Course of D.A.M.S. in Bologna, briefly.  Since 2012 he is the co-editor of Phases Magazine, an online publication that showcases fine art photography and he is represented by CAN Christina Androulidaki Gallery.

Cristina Velasquez is a visual artist working mainly with photography and paper weavings. Her work investigates representation and translation in the context of transcultural relationships —both as mechanisms for oppression and silencing, as well as powerful tools for connection and resistance. She is interested in the way one culture translates another, and how inevitably, a dominant culture sanitizes and reduces the other in a subtle, and not so subtle, continuity of colonialism. Similarly, Velásquez explores the ways social constructions of value, such as, race, class, and labor distribution, are shaped by images and language, echoing a larger system of power and exchange that goes beyond borders and nationality. Velásquez asks how photography and weaving might be called upon to further the understanding of social politics, history, and narrative, particularly in relation to Latin American studies. Her first monograph, Viterbo, was published by Kris Graves Projects in April, 2019. It is available for purchase here.

Raised in a conventional Parisian family, Marylise Vigneau developed an early taste for peeping through keyholes and climbing walls. Her “Compared Literature” thesis, at la Sorbonne, was about cities as characters in Russian and Central-European novels; where and when the clearest narrative gets lost in a heady, haunting uncertainty.  Despite her fascination with literature, over time her mode of expression has become photography, without her knowing precisely why - may be the mix of precision, immediacy, truth and lies which is behind every image. What attracts her first and foremost is how human beings are affected by borders both physical and mental, this fugitive space where an unexpected, bold and fragile act or glimpse of freedom can arise.

Martin Wannam (b. 1992, Guatemala) uses photography, video, and sculpture to expose the role of religion in the repression of Latin American queer communities. Through the critical lenses of gender, sexuality, and race he challenges his own cultural background and deconstructs and disrupts the hegemony of religion as his own gesture of political resistance. Wannam currently resides in Albuquerque, NM, and is pursuing an MFA in Art Studio in the area of Photography. His work has been exhibited nationally and international, included in exhibitions in Guatemala, the USA, Rotterdam and Paris.

Christian Woodward is a San Diego based photographer who focuses on people, their environments, and the interactions therein. While attaining a Bachelor’s degree in psychology, he pursued a minor specialization in lens-based art at the College of New Jersey, exhibiting his work in catalogues and gallery shows produced by the school.

Tagger Yancey IV is a queer photographer, photo editor, and fine artist originally from Rochester, New York. He earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012, and has lived in Brooklyn since.