group show 70
Under the Sun and the Moon
About the Artists
Aaron Hartzell
Bio: Aaron Hartzell is a photographer and artist living in the beautiful PNW. He graduated from UW with a BFA in Photo Media. He works at Green River College as an Instructional Tech for the Photo Department. Along with photography he enjoys hiking and camping.
Statement: Theoretically in the far distant future space itself will expand so much that the distance will be too great for light even from the closest stars to reach us. I think about this while looking through some old family photos. I imagine the distance in time we have traveled since the moment these images were captured. I realize these pictures were taken so we would remember but see now they reveal the ephemeral nature of experience. This work explores the ideas of distance, family history, and the sky.
Adam Leitzel
Bio: Adam Leitzel is an artist based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Adam’s work tends to focus on interpersonal struggles, and his place within society. His work has been exhibited locally at the Demuth Museum, Rock Lititz, and the North Museum of Nature and Science, and internationally at the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China. His work has also been published by Booooooom!
Statement: When I think of the sun and moon, I think of my connection to nature or lack thereof. These images act as contemplative moments that are both meditative and poetic for me. Each image acts as a sculpture of time that encapsulates something ephemeral, that unless experienced in that moment, would only live on through word of mouth or just in my memory.
Adrienne Defendi
Bio: Adrienne Defendi is an artist whose work explores the cyclical, the ephemeral, and the fragility of life. Her lifelong interests in memory and myth, narrative and nostalgia inform her photographic expression and artistic process. Employing different mediums, from analog to alternative processes and various printmaking techniques, her practice charts elements of loss and ritual, and the boundless possibilities within reiteration and experimentation. Adrienne lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Statement: This image is from an ongoing series entitled Memoria that explores the archeology of loss and renewal in light of the recent California fires. A multi-coated and exposed unique cyanotype, the image integrates ash and the whisper of tree branches, both collected from burn-scarred woods. The submission’s title: Memoria XXXIX.
Alexa Cushing
Bio: Alexa Cushing is a photographer based in southeast Massachusetts. She holds a BFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She travels around her rural New England home by car, searching for photographs that extract a sense of magic from the everyday landscape.
Statement: My photographs are often influenced by the deep effect the sun and moon have on the atmosphere of an environment. This image is from an ongoing project about the the supernatural folklore of the area of Massachusetts where I live. The sun and moon transform the landscape of my images in the same way the residents of this community use this folklore to transform an otherwise quiet working class area.
Alexandria Riesberg
Bio: Alexandria Riesberg began photographing as a teenager out of desperation to point to and invent beautiful things in herself and surroundings, seeking gravity in an unstable world. Through photographic and collaged portraits she engages with spirituality and identity, uncovering and inventing the playful magic that gives her life meaning. She received the Parsons Dean’s portfolio grant from 2017-21 and is based in Brooklyn where she can be found admiring pigeons and rollerblading.
Statement: In tarot, The Sun represents the source of life on Earth. Divining fortune and vitality, it reminds us that abundance is the truth of life and gives light to see it. In my tarot series, I depict love as my most reliable teacher. When I am caught in shadow, love turns my attention to the dawn and reminds me that my very existence is a testament to the fact of this light which generously sustains me.
Ali Motamedi
Bio: Ali Motamedi is an Iranian-American writer and photographer whose work focuses on city life, travel, immigration, and self-identity. He has a PhD in civil engineering and has studied storytelling courses at the SVA and ICP in New York City. His essays and short stories have been published in Farsi and English literary magazines, and his photography has been displayed in several group exhibitions in both Tehran and the US.
Statement: “Almost playing with the sun!”, Long Island NY, July 2019
Amanda Tinker
Bio: Amanda Tinker (b. 1974) was raised in New Jersey and currently works and resides in Philadelphia. She has been teaching the history of photography and 19th c. processes since 2001. In her process, Amanda uses large analogue cameras and 19th c. photographic techniques as a way of arranging nature into layered compositions. She makes use of the private garden, and all that it contains, to explore the balance of human creativity and nature’s own momentum.
Statement: In this series of photographs, I arrange details of the natural world collected from my family garden, children’s books and vintage identification guides. Each photograph looks at the natural world as if it were held just for our observation, suspended far from any recognizable landscape. Nature’s small beauties, such as birds, butterflies, twigs and petals become objects of contemplation, organized into layered configurations.
Ana Pereira
Bio: ana caria was born in Lisbon. Degree in Photography, Master in Social and Human Sciences. Since 2004 he has been working in teaching photography, black and white printing and 19th century photographic processes. Your photographic projects explore - studies of a reimagined landscape
Statement: The project Lunar atmosphere researches, through the medium cianotype prints, the movements, gases and solar erosion processes that take place in the moon. The presence of sodium and potassium in the lunar atmosphere, creates the correlation with the historic photographic process of cyanotype in which these same chemicals are used. The work is created by exposing the cyanotype paper to sunlight - by the sea - as the wave motion and the presence of sand, establishes poetic and circular dialog with lunar landscapes.
Anargyros Drolapas
Bio: Anargyros Drolapas is a Greek photographer living in Athens. He studied Physics (BSc), IT (MSc) and Science Education (PhD) in University of Athens and Photography and Digital Language in Middlesex University and AKTO. He has steadily pursued photography, presenting his work in various international magazines and group exhibitions.
Statement: Sun and the moon are up there, a constant observer, sometimes they are protagonists of the sky, and some times an extra in a more complex scenery.
Anna Rotty
Bio: Anna Rotty is a photo-based artist currently living in Albuquerque where she is pursuing an MFA in photography at the University of New Mexico. Originally from Massachusetts, by way of San Francisco, Anna is interested in nostalgia and our understanding of memory and place. She has recently been published in Aint Bad and has shown work at Root Division, Collectors Photography Gallery, SF Camerawork and Incline Gallery.
Statement: Using light and an emergency blanket, I constructed landscapes within my apartment. I investigate solastalgia, a term used to describe emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change. As the sun works it’s way across the interior of my home I build worlds based on memory and response to place. In this volatile moment, I explore the drastic shift in emotions each day holds, through the lens of our human relationship with the landscape.
Anthony Carr
Bio: Anthony Carr is a photographic artist, born in London, UK, now living in Victoria, BC, Canada. Carr has a BA in Fine Art Printmaking, and has exhibited in photography festivals and galleries across four continents since his degree show in 1999. With an interest in the intersection of art and science, Carr’s approach to photography is experimental and celebrates the materiality of analogue photography. He was recently the inaugural winner of the Glover Rayner Prize.
Statement: For many years my work has been inspired by our nearest celestial neighbour and by the human desire to travel beyond Earth. All the images I’ve submitted record the Moon in some way; from tracing its heavenly journey during a single night in Image 2 and 3, to journeys over 5 months in Image 1, during a Lunar Eclipse in Image 5 and finally capturing it as a waxing crescent just after a New Moon.
Armelle Tulunda
Bio: Armelle Tulunda is an artist whose work explores the photographic medium and its history through experimenting with alternative processes and/or photomontages. She's interested in the different ways photography is and has been instrumentalized in scientific research, and more precisely, in the astronomical imagery.
Statement: Moyi (The sun) is a photograph of a perforated drawing of our star, inspired by a part of the kongolese cosmogram - Yowa : the last (known) trace before colonization of our understanding of cycles of human life on earth, in the cosmos and other realms. In this cosmogram, the movements of the sun in the southern hemisphere are linked to the different cycles of the human life.
Balarama Heller
Bio: Balarama Heller lives and works in New York City. His practice reimagines archetypal symbols found in the natural world. He explores primal symbols, ritual, and spirituality both real and imagined, working towards a visual language of preverbal awareness.
Statement: Gazing up at the night sky provokes primordial awe. The original shrine of early human worship was the celestial sphere. Looking up from Earth gives one the sense that the vast array is looking back at you, there is a relationship, cold and luminous but somehow animate.
Barbara Ciurej & Lindsay Lochman
Bio: Photographic collaborators Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman mine the confluence of history, myth and popular culture to frame contemporary tales and critique the societal landscape. They have been working together for over four decades, employing staged photography, studio constructions, documentary, alternative processes and artists’ books in their practice. Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is in many public and private collections.
Statement: This much we know… Long, long ago, phantasmagoric voyagers traveled through time, thrumming with the energy of the Big Bang. We recognize kinship and yearn to connect with these unencumbered creatures of light. Sightings were reported — split second glimpses, like lightning in the desert monsoon. We call out to them in silvery voices. We park our vehicles, scan the skies, and await electrifying deliverance.
Barrie Lynn Bryant
Bio: Barrie Lynn Bryant began learning fine art photography in 1989 by taking Photo 1 at UALR under Gary Cawood. Barrie instantly fell in love with it and began producing a self-assigned body of work, The Arkansas Diaries. In 1990, Barrie’s portfolio landed him his first pro job as assistant in the studio/darkroom and on location with renowned architectural photographer, Tim Hursley, where Barrie was exposed to the international marketplace. Barrie went solo in 1992.
Statement: My photographs show the moon as it has set in Kirby, Wyoming at various times during the past six months, and I’ve taken them from the western boundary of my yard or very close by using a 400mm focal length lens in order to compress the space. I began actualizing my fascination with the moon as seen from my fence line back in January 2018 with my landmark image, Moon Setting over the Hernandez’s.
Bec Imrich
Bio: Bec Imrich is an interdisciplinary artist whose work uses often photography and alternative processes to investigate the world around them. They have been interested in photography’s potential to confuse scale and reorient since watching “The Powers of Ten” on a rolling-cart tv in elementary school. Their current work examines where environmental precarity meets anxiety and alienation.
Statement: In “Looking for a place to land” (second work submitted, with handmade lightboxes), I took close-up images of my own body and skin, and rearranged, layered, and manipulated them to recall lunar topographies.
Brian Matthew Hart
Bio: Brian Matthew Hart is a Minneapolis-based artist whose work frequently uses cameras and photographs as raw materials; leveraging photographic hardware and media to make drawings, sculptures and new media expressions
Statement: some of the first photo-based work i made in the early days of the global pandemic revolved around the sun and moon; timeless, constant, persistent & impossibly far away
Caroline Allison
Bio: Born in Atlanta in 1972, Caroline Allison received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BA from The University of the South, Sewanee. Her work has been included in group exhibitions in the US and internationally, including ZieherSmith (Nashville), Whitespace Gallery (Atlanta), Howard Greenberg Gallery (NYC), the Bronx Museum, Lehmann Maupin (NYC), and Daniel Cooney Fine Art (NYC).
Statement: From a new series entitled Behind the Moon, these images are centered around our relationship to the present day environment. Time’s steadfast and quiet presence is evident in these photographs of the passing moon and changing tides. Through multiple exposures, sometimes as many as 50 exposures onto one sheet of film, the photographs are attempts to seize time and understand the thin slice of air and earth that sustains us and that we precariously inhabit.
Cassie Jain
Bio: Cassie Jain is a photographer and art historian. Her work explores notions of memory, nostalgia, and love in personal landscapes, most recently her own. Jain works primarily with the silver gelatin process and analogue equipment; she has recently incorporated zine making into practice. She holds a BA with honors in Art History from Vassar College. You can find her in the darkroom, singing Phoebe Bridgers and on Zoom with her best friend.
Statement: This photograph centers around the imagery of the solar eclipse and the sun as a bright spot. Some of the photographs of this series were made during the summer 2017 eclipse, while I was in Florida visiting my grandparents. I was drawn to the sci-fi memorabilia of the eclipse. Since then I have been continually captivated with the way the sun “burns” the negative, appearing as a blown out spot in the sky or in a reflection.
Centa Schumacher
Bio: Centa Schumacher is a lens-based artist and educator based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is the former director of the recently-closed gallery Phosphor Project Space. Centa has shown her work nationally, including Paradice Palase in Brooklyn, NY, Aggregate Space in Oakland, CA, and a recent solo exhibition at 707 Gallery in Pittsburgh. She received her MFA from San Francisco State University.
Statement: Astronomically, an eclipse occurs when a shadow blocks the sun or the moon. Astrologically, eclipses are seen as times of dynamic and often explosive change. Eclipse Season explores the revealing and obscuring that exist within the lived experience. When shadows move aside, what kind of light bursts through? What blocks do we put in place in order to obscure our own vision? What is left in the aftermath of change? This work exists in the pivot point between one reality and the next, an uncomfortable pause before moving into the unknown.
Chris Becher
Bio: Chris Becher is a photo-based artist and writer living and working between The Hague (NL) and Cologne (GER). His practice ponders on portraiture’s potential to convey the modes how personhood is shaped by individual and social histories. He holds a MA of KABK Royal Academy of Art The Hague 2021, studied at KHM Academy of Media Arts Cologne (diploma) 2016 and UNAL National University Bogotá 2014. He is recent selectee of the FOTODOK Lighthouse Talent Program 2021/2022 (NL) with his ongoing work Latencies.
Statement: Latencies addresses the dynamic play of how we experience and perceive the world and humans along the lines of our commonalities and differences. How are we shaped by the multiple structural, often hidden but omnipresent powers that surround us in contemporary societies? How do these forces, intersecting with categories such as class, gender, race, sexuality, have an influence on how we constitute our selfs and inform ideas about others, how do they limit the ways how we can flourish and be together?
Christina Phan
Bio: "For Christina Phan, her photography is her paintings". Christina Phan is a self-taught photographer who honed he knowledge and skill while working as a commercial photographer for more than a decade. For her, visual inspirations could come from anywhere. Photography is like a diary from everyday life. Her favourites are art and candid photographs because she wants to preserve the feelings.
Statement: Every time I see the shining sun and the dim of the moon, it always makes me instantly want to capture them with the grateful feeling of the harmony of the warmth of the sun and the beauty of the moon. A gentle reminder for me as apart from the nature of the galaxy. Both are opposites, but they're also complimentary. Beautiful objects whisper to us the significant truths about the good life.
Christopher Meerdo
Bio: Christopher Meerdo is an artist who grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Šiauliai, Lithuania. Meerdo received his MFA in Photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago and was recently appointed Assistant Professor of Photography and New Media at the University of North Texas. Recent exhibitions include Exgirlfriend Gallery, Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and The Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh. He is represented by DOCUMENT Gallery, Chicago.
Statement: In the summer of 2011, I photographed the sun tens of thousands of times using an early 1990's digital camera. This resulted in the intentional degradation of the image sensor, which obfuscated its recording capabilities and ultimately rendered the camera inoperable. The outcome of this experiment resulted in a series of images that considers the limitations of the photographic image.
Christopher Woodcock
Bio: Christopher Woodcock is an artist and educator based in Sonoma, California. His work investigates the poetic potential the photographic image provides to depict the natural and anthropogenic forces that shape our lived experience. His work is represented by the Benrubi Gallery in New York.
Statement: My images are shaped not only by the light of the moon but also by the historical associations that surround them. I set out to follow the same routes as the 1864 Geological Survey, at that time the last unknown region of the continental United States. Making photos with a 4x5 inch view camera at night, each image is exposed for hours at a time under the light of the moon.
CJ Benninger
Bio: CJ Benninger is a portrait photographer who began photographing contemporary landscapes and night scenes during the pandemic.
Statement: The chosen image is a black and white photo of the moon photographed with a Canon 5D MK3 in the late afternoon. The blues of the sky have been shifted to black to give the appearance of nighttime.
CJ Heyliger
Bio: CJ Heyliger is a photo-based artist whose work assesses the veracity of the photographic image in relation to human perception and experience. CJ received a Masters Degree in Fine Art from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2015 and a BFA from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University in 2006. He is represented by Gallery Luisotti in Los Angeles.
Statement: The sun has been a perennial subject of mine ever since moving to the West Coast 8 years ago. These particular images are from the series Heliotrope. Heliotrope consists of various studies and experiments relating to the sun, and explores the sun’s unique ability to simultaneously rationalize and redact information in a photograph. The images in this series are produced in-camera, utilizing solarization, multiple-exposures, and other techniques that are specific to the medium of photography.
Claire A. Warden
Bio: Claire A. Warden (b. Montreal, Quebec) has been exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. She received an Artist Research and Development Grant, Philadelphia Photo Arts Center Contemporary Photography Exhibition award and the Ed Friedman Award from the Griffin Museum of Photography. Her work has been featured in Der Greif Magazine, Strange Fire Collective, Lenscratch, and Diffusion Magazine. Claire has a forthcoming residency at Light Work in Syracuse, New York.
Statement: The series 99 Moons explores universal human experiences with the moon using a cameraless photographic process. Each piece is completely constructed in the darkroom and the result is a unique silver gelatin print. Despite the infinite possibilities of unique experiences had gazing at the moon, we all live under the same moon.
Clarissa Bonet
Bio: Clarissa Bonet is an artist based in Chicago whose work investigates the physical and psychological effects of the built environment on the pedestrian. She received her MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago. Bonet’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and resides in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Southeast Museum of Photography, Haggerty Museum of Art, University Club Chicago, and the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection.
Statement: City Space investigates the modern city center—a transitory space in which the masses convene for brief moments in time. Drawing from personal experiences and observations, I create images that deconstruct the pedestrian urban experience, contemplating anonymity, anxiety, urban planning, surveillance, and the divide between public and private space. My work utilizes the sun in collaboration with the built environment to create dramatically lit images that set the stage for the drama of everyday life to unfold upon.
Daniela Beltran B.
Bio: Daniela Beltran B. is a visual artist and photographer whose work lies between documentary and fine art. In 2020 she completed her BFA in Photography at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Born and raised in Ecuador, she had the opportunity to constantly travel back and forth from California, which allowed her to expand her understanding of different cultures and societies. Throughout this time, nature has remained a constant subject in all of her work. Daniela’s introspective process is reflected in the work she produces, with the sensitivity from which she captures the living environment that surrounds us or interprets inner concepts. Her work explores human-nature relationship, indigenous culture, and the spiritual realms of consciousness.
Statement: Inspired by ancient wisdom and esoteric teachings by Hermes Trismegistus. These photographs focus on the Universal Law of Correspondence. Everything in the Microcosm is a reflection of the Macrocosm, and viceversa. As well as the interconnected nature of the three planes of existence: mental, physical, and spiritual; each reflecting each other. Everything that exists in the Universe comes from the same source, same laws, principles and characteristics. I photographed the reflection of the sun from a tiny puddle of water the size of my hand (first three images), and the full moon (last image), all shot with 35mm and 120mm film.
Danny Jay
Bio: Danny is a Santa Cruz, California based photographer, who uses the darkroom in an attempt to uncover a hidden meaning within a moment. What manifests through a serendipitous approach to darkroom practices may reveal a disintegration, a glitch in reality, or a dream state. Danny attempts to walk hand in hand with the viewer to a world they've created in their own subconscious.
Statement: This work uses film negatives and paper manipulation to explore the tension between truth and fiction in photography. A photograph, in a vernacular sense, is perceived to be a moment frozen in time; a snapshot or memory one can carry with them and remember - a truth. Realistically, however, a photograph is a deception. Nothing more than the perception of the photographer, who decided what was in frame, or, in this case added after the fact.
Debora Francis
Bio: Debora Francis is an interdisciplinary photographic artist working primarily with Mordançage, photogram, and darkroom experimentation. With a B.A. in Psychology, Debora's approach is rooted in a devotion to self-awareness. She forms deep connections to her subject matter and processes while resonating an innate sensitivity to human frailty and interdependence. Her art serves as an intimate therapeutic tool and is an expression of vulnerability and survival.
Statement: All prints submitted are one-of-kind, gelatin silver photograms from my ongoing series, "The Mask I Wear for Approval." This body of work confronts the feeling of insignificance. I instinctively express myself in phases in the darkroom. Waxing and waning, these pieces mirror my emotions, facing shadows and harnessing the transformative power of light. Creating each image is a unique and intimate encounter, enabling healing, forgiveness, and personal growth.
Elena Helfrecht
Bio: Elena Helfrecht (*1992, born and based in Bavaria) is a visual artist working with photography. She completed her MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art in London in 2019, after studying Art and Image History at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin until 2017 and receiving her BA in Art History and Book Science from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität in Erlangen in 2015. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally.
Statement: 'Unternächte' explores the days and nights around the winter solstice in Bavaria, when life and death, light and darkness meet, and the gates to the otherworld are said to be wide open. This time, where the old has not yet entirely faded, but the new has not fully risen, is seen as a vacuum, both dangerous and cathartic, requiring specific rules to ensure a safe transition from the old chaos into a new order. Exploring mortality and generational transition through ideas of ritualism, magic, dreams, and clairvoyance, tied to her female lineage, Elena Helfrecht invents new rituals and expands the myths she grew up with. Local customs, family history, and personal experiences are woven into dreams and fantasy, in an attempt to grasp a full circle.
Elizabeth Chiles
Bio: Elizabeth Chiles was studying Art History at Columbia University when, while taking a course with Jonathan Crary, she became interested in photography. She went on to get an MFA from SFAI. She has been working as a professor and showing her work ever since.
Statement: This lumen print was inspired by a group of volunteer sunflowers that arrived in April and stayed until August during the covid pandemic. There were so many sunflowers I could not count them. Their bounty reminded me of the repetitive days we were experiencing; an ethereal yet ever-present wall of time. Lumen prints use the light from the sun to make impressions - a fitting technique for this subject – of the sun, by the sun. I think of each sunflower lumen as a time keeper.
Em White
Bio: Raised in rural Virginia, Em White is a self-taught visual artist and documentarian, specializing in historic photographic processes and large format work. Her portrait and fine art practice are intertwined, often using tintype, glass negatives and experimental film techniques. Working out of her mobile darkroom, she makes meticulously hand-crafted images of people and place. Rather than strictly documenting countenance or topography, her emphasis is on extending perception, producing experiential imagery that counters the static frame. White’s work has been exhibited in various group shows and her debut solo exhibition High Water was held at Candela Gallery in 2021. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia where she has a portrait studio and teaches darkroom photography.
Statement: Some brilliance is best experienced through an intermediary–our star is so powerful it can blind or kill us if we get too close. Glittering Plane is a project to capture the energy of the sun in various states of reflection: tracing moonrises over the river with extended exposures or transcribing its noonday dance on the water’s surface. Maybe these mesmeric forms will surface forgotten memories. We might recall our place in the moving cosmos and our forgotten duties to protect it
Emma Wieslander
Bio: Emma Wieslander’s landscapes explore historical and current ideas of the interrelation between the perceived, depicted and described landscape. Concerned with specific understandings of landscapes, Wieslander revisits historical and current viewpoints, investigating different ways of interpreting these. She received her Ma in Fine Art Photography from the Royal College of Art. Exhibitions include Mijn Vlakke Land, FoMu Antwerp, On Landscape #2, Materia Gallery, Rome, On Landscape #1, Guest Projects, London, Distracted and Bewildered, Galleri Pictura, Sweden, Kaunas Photo Festival, Lithuania.
Statement: In ‘Wish You Were Here’ Wieslander has produced a series of constructed images that teeter between sunset seascapes and images of light bulbs hanging above a dirty studio floor. Although the reality of the set-up is difficult to ignore, the eye somehow longs to draw out the illusion of sky, sun and sea. A few drips left behind by the studio’s previous occupant are combined with the clichés of landscape composition in a bid for visual seduction.
Eric Carroll
Bio: Eric William Carroll’s work on photography, science, and nature explores the differences in how we experience, represent, and organize the world. At the heart of his practice is a genuine sense of curiosity that interrogates scientific archives including long-term residencies at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive, and the Donald Glaser Archive at Caltech. Carroll’s work has been exhibited internationally and resides in numerous public collections. He currently lives in Asheville, NC.
Statement: Standard Stars is a collaboration with materials from the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive. The Archive is attempting to collect all the glass plate astronomical photographs in one central repository. Carroll’s interest is focused on the objects that have deteriorated due to time, human error, or a combination of the two. Visually and metaphorically, the Archive represents the human attempt to study, organize, and represent the Universe. In Carroll’s archive, the organization and representation devolves into chaos and abstraction.
Fred Lahache
Bio: Fred’s keenly observed photographs chronicle the landscapes and still lives he discovers as well as the people he meets. He arranges them into compelling narratives and creates dynamic juxtapositions.
Statement: Some of these are part of my series One Day at a Time (work made during covid lockdown). Others are different observations from the past.
Georgia Matsamaki
Bio: Georgia Matsamaki was born in Greece. She holds a BA in Graphic Design and Photography. She has also attended a series of online courses on photography from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) of New York and the University of Edinburgh. Her graphic design and photographic work has been featured worldwide in competitions, group exhibitions, as well as online platforms that focus on contemporary photography.
Statement: This photograph/digital collage is part of the ongoing “What If?” series (2021-), a project based on parallel universes and the possibilities of existing as a different self in another dimension.
Gigi Gatewood
Bio: Gigi Gatewood is an artist living in the Hudson Valley. Gatewood’s interest in the history of objects, the power of belief, and occult photography began at a young age influenced by her Italian elders. After receiving an MFA from RISD, she moved to Trinidad as a Fulbright Fellow photographing the islands’ complex spiritual landscape. She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Art & Design at Siena College.
Statement: Power, artifacts, and politics of belief has been the focus of my work over the past decade. Still Lifes comprised of spiritually charged objects dominate my large format photographs. For this series of cyanotypes, I traced and cut out the objects in my photographs to create a reverse silhouette, eliminating the signature blue of a cyanotype. I wanted to see what remains if I reduced the idols to their shadows.
Grant Gill
Bio: Grant Gill is a Milwaukee based photographer working with themes of magic and queerness. They are interested by the possibility of a limitless structure—an object changing state, becoming flexible, disappearing and then returning. These properties formally align with a general understanding of magic, and in many ways, they have found these concepts to surface in queerness as well. Photography, in its construction, is the definition of possibility to a limitless structure. It is manipulated light fractured in both time and space.
Statement: Fascinated by the sun’s sublime nature as a celestial object—equal parts terrifying and beautiful—Glowing Images manipulates the sun’s light as if it were my own magic to wield. Such magic is conducted through conduits of reflection and refraction, and found in physical objects that shine bright, or at times, hum with glows of oranges and yellows. These traces display how the lingering presence of the sun affects the surface of things.
Hannah Altman
Bio: Hannah Altman is a Jewish-American artist from New Jersey. She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her photographs interpret relationships between gestures, the body, lineage, and interior space.
Statement: This image, titled Reflecting Light, builds from the Jewish ritual of gazing at our fingernails in the light of the candle as a reminder to keep sacred practices close as the sun sets. This image of my mom expands on this idea by wearing nails made out of mirrors, reflecting the sun back at me as I photograph close to her face.
Hannah Subotnick
Bio: Hannah Subotnick (b.1992, Providence, RI) was born in a blizzard during a lunar eclipse. She is an artist working in film, animation, photography, dance, sound, and installation. Although her work crosses many disciplines, at its core is a love of the transformative potential of the lens and its ability to abstract, reveal, and transport. Direct physical experience is important to her in her making process.
Statement: Eurydice is a photograph of yearning—an emotional lunar eclipse.
Harold Diaz
Bio: Harold Diaz is a collage and photographic artist who currently resides in Miami. His conceptual work focuses on homoerotic identity, transcendence and the unknown. Harold’s work has been exhibited internationally in Italy, Germany, France, the UK and the U.S. Images from the “Gradations: An Archive" series were selected for the UK 2015 Format International Photography Festival. Publications include Gestalten’s The Age of Collage and both print and online features.
Statement: The select image is part of an ongoing series titled "Pessulum" (Latin for "A Bolt").
Hyacinth Schukis
Bio: Hyacinth Schukis is an artist and academic. They are based in Portland, Oregon. They hold bachelor’s degrees in Art and Art History from the University of Oregon, and are currently an MFA candidate at Image Text Ithaca.
Statement: This image is from a series of photographs begun in 2020 that seeks to reconcile my inheritance of and influence by queer neo/classical aesthetics. The work is comprised largely of appropriated postcards and constructed self-portraits, and will be finalized as a book and as a modular wall installation. The underlying narratives of the images are a detailed exploration of the ways in which my brief training as an archaeologist of ancient Greek art framed my coming-out as queer and transgender.
Jacob Weeks
Bio: Jacob Weeks (*1989, born and based in South East England) is a visual artist working with photography. Weeks’s work revolves around the themes of absence, loss and mourning and explore how our relationship with these themes is often caught up in our attachments to the material world. Inspired by personal life histories, Week's work sheds some light (and shadow) on some of our darkest times.
Statement: The works circles around the themes of death, loss and mourning and explore how our relationship with these themes is often caught up in our attachments to the material world. The photographs of these lost objects appear planetary-like objects looming out of the dark, Weeks’ work haunts us with questions about the material body, its afterlife and the limitations of belief. The Sky image (number 3) was made during the lockdown period, always looking up contemplating the sky.
Jenny Riffle
Bio: Jenny Riffle (b. 1979, Mt. Vernon, WA) graduated from Bard College in 2001 with a BA in Photography; she received her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in 2011. Riffle works with narrative portraiture and landscapes that explore the psychological essence of a person or place. Her current work explores the power of nature in the Pacific Northwest through the beauty and darkness of the forest.
Statement: This image was made with a pinhole camera. I felt an interesting parallel in how the pinhole captures time, as my concept of time quickly disappeared in the endless days of the pandemic and one day blurred into the next, similarly the pinhole captures many days all blurred together into one image. The only sign of time passing is the trail the sun leaves in the sky each day it comes out.
Jody Poorwill
Bio: Jody Poorwill (B. 1977, New York; Lives In Tacoma, Washington) received their BFA with a concentration In Photography In 2001 From The State University Of New York (SUNY), Purchase College. Jody’s work has been featured in VICE, Don’t Take Pictures, Humble Art Foundation, Too Tired Projects, A New Nothing, Weekly Volcano, Cumulus Photo, Streit House and The Stranger.
Statement: Jody uses their camera to connect and celebrate the phases of the moon.
Jonathan Tasker
Bio: Jonathan Tasker a Photographer and video maker from South London based now in NYC.
Statement: Digital Moon - December 16th 2019 - First recored cased of COVID-19 infected human in the world. Feb 6th 2020 - First Death in the US recorded March 5th 2020 - First Death in the UK recorded May 1st 2020 - Original end of the project Each Moon is digital projected and reflected on a body of water.
Joseph Desler Costa
Bio: Joseph Desler Costa is an American and Italian artist working in photography, video and new media. Works explore consumerist dreams, nostalgia and origins of desire by investigating the sleek aesthetics of commercial photography, advertising and design while experimenting with ways to rethink its implicit messages.
Statement: This work is about looking both away and inward. It is an attempt at world and myth building. It is about escape and potential. The world is harsh and ruthless, but the promises of consumerism and material culture, at least on the surface, offer a path to transcendence and transformation. Manufactured desire is still desire. The picture explores imagery from my formative years to understand the visual language that informs my fantasies, perceived role in the world and even my character.
Joshua Hobson
Bio: Joshua Hobson is a lens-based artist based in Spokane, WA. He studied photography at the University of Florida and received a BFA in Creative Photography in 2007 and an MFA in 2017. Josh regularly exhibits his work including exhibitions at Candela Books, Colorado Center for Photographic Art, Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography, and the Center for Fine Art Photography. Josh is currently a lecturer in photography at Eastern Washington University.
Statement: Sunstroke is from a series of lumen prints called Uncontained. The image deals directly with the power of the sun as both a life-giving and destructive force. I made this as an unprecedented heatwave gripped the Western states and thick clouds of wildfire smoke filled the air. Exposed directly to the sun, these prints are created using a combination of photogram techniques and contact-printed transparencies of un-contained forest fires.
Julianna Foster
Bio: Julianna Foster is currently an assistant professor in the School of Art, Photography Program at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She received a BFA in Design from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (2001) and an MFA in Book Arts + Printmaking from the University of the Arts (2006). As an artist, Foster has exhibited work nationally and internationally, in private collections across the country, and her photographs, essays and interviews are included in many publications. The award winning project, Geographical Lore is a selection of photographic works that considers ways in which the natural world can be represented. Combining photographic images of both the natural world and hand-made, assembled environments, a blend of the fabricated and the “real” image play with ideas of memory and representation. As an educator, Foster has taught in various departments at UArts, such as Photography (formerly Media Arts), Foundation, Fine Arts, MFA in Book Arts + Printmaking and MFA in Studio Art, as well as the Continuing Education and Pre-College programs. Courses include both lecture and studio, Photography I & II, Color Concepts, Critical and Contemporary Issues in Photography Seminar, Senior Photography Workshop, Professional Practices, Fine Arts Seminar, 2D Design Principles and Time Motion. In addition to courses taught, she has served as a mentor in the graduate programs and graduate thesis committees. She has collaborated with various artists on projects that include creating artist multiples, artist books and series of photographs and video and is represented by gallery ParisTexasLa, a contemporary art space in Los Angeles.
Statement: The series consists of a combination of two-dimensional images like framed photographs, broadsides, light-boxes and three-dimensional objects such as cut and manipulated photographs and artist books. They combine photographic images of both the natural world and hand-made, assembled environments. The deliberate blend of the fabricated and the "real" image play with ideas of memory and representation.
Kelly Burgess
Bio: Kelly Burgess (she/her) is a project-based conceptual photographer, curator, publisher, and arts administrator that lives and works in rural Vermont. Emotional narrative is the thematic thread running through her work, with much of her own photography and writing coming directly from personal experiences.
Statement: The submitted photo is from an ongoing series called The Fool's Journey about magic and the natural world.
Landon McKinley
Bio: Landon McKinley is a visual artist from small-town Mardela Springs, MD. They received their Bachelors of Fine Arts with a concentration in photography from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2019, and now reside in Baltimore. As a child they never took photographs because they thought drawing and writing stories was more interesting.
Statement: This photograph is only one from a group I have made over the past several years. At the end of a tobacco plants life cycle, the leaves become spotted and filled with holes. I have been photographing the leaves stretched over the setting sun in an attempt to shine light through the holes like a speckle of stars. It's a reflection of the end of its life, the day, and the labor associated with it.
Laura Minor
Bio: Laura Minor is artist and art educator living in Hamburg, NY. I studied photography at the Fashion institute of Technology and art education at Buffalo State College. I went to receive my MFA from The Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. I use both Historic and modern photo processes to explore issues of femininity, motherhood, and the environment. For the past 8 years I have taught elementary art for Buffalo Public Schools.
Statement: In my series Celestial Bodies I combine digital and analog photography processes. Archival images are combined with contemporary images of space. Drawn to the figures’ demure, reserved poses, I think of these women in the background, orbiting the action an invisible force influencing those in their sphere. Their faces obscured by the sun and moons of our solar system. Although we have images of these places their existence is enigmatic.
Laura Plageman
Bio: Artist Laura Plageman is best known for her studio practice of creatively re-working her large-scale, color photographs through techniques such as re-photography, image layering, and collage. Reflecting on the interconnectedness of nature, her work aims to convey an experiential view of a landscape, embedded with human presence. She fell in love with the transformative power of photography in college, earning a BA at Wesleyan University and an MFA from the California College of the Arts.
Statement: This image is a long exposure and a layered image of sunrises, sunsets, moonrises, and related phenomena. It is both documents and imagined recreations that encompass my experience of looking and of remembering. I’m thinking about the awe and wonder of the natural world that stops a person in their tracks, if only for a moment, and holds us together in a shared point of view from life on earth.
Laura Noel
Bio: Laura Noel is an Atlanta-based, photographer and installation artist. She has been a Walthall Fellow and recipient of an Idea Capital Grant. Her work is in the collection of The High Museum of Art, The George Eastman House, The Ogden Museum in New Orleans, MOCA GA and a number of private and public collections.
Statement: These photographs are in response to narratives conveyed by the natural world including the sun and moon. Though a few of the pictures are not manipulated, this series includes photographs that are a kind of still life-straight hybrid. Noel sometimes brings objects with her and uses them to tell a different story or augment a notion that is already present.
Leor Miller
Bio: Leor Miller is a photographer, writer, and musician from Evanston, Illinois currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work is about the ways we construct reality and the ways we reckon with the unknown when the structure of our understanding begins to crumble. Leor studied photography at Bard College and her work has most recently been published in MATTE Magazine #57: Leor Miller and Linden Crawford.
Statement: I am interested in the unknowable phenomena occurring beneath the surface of the physical world and behind our concepts of reality. We seek guidance from the light cascading down from the sky, illuminating the path before us, reassuring us that it is safe to move forth. This image is concerned with the interplay between the sky and the earth, the light and the shadow, the known and the unknown. Is the eclipse a trick of the mind, of the camera, of nature? Categories become confused, things are not as they seem, the light pours from the surface of the earth. This is a process of reality-making on a small scale, reflecting the ways we construct meaning out of absurdity in order to make sense of the world.
Lieh Sugai
Bio: Japanese-born Lieh Sugai is a New York visual artist who works with photography and video. Her subject matter is memories that occur between people and places. To explore these, she uses her dual perspective as a Japanese immigrant whose home is also in America. Lieh studied Graphic Design at Pratt Institute, where photography became her prevailing passion, as a way to enter, express and document different cultures, and to push the boundaries of her creativity.
Statement: TRACE is a collected work of photographic images created using a historical process, chemigram. These images were created mainly during the past year of 2020 and became a reflection of reminiscence and nostalgia toward my home country, Japan during that difficult year. It is also a reflection of a feeling of emptiness, surrender and acceptance to a greater and larger force or power, such as nature and the universe.
Luke Harby
Bio: Luke Harby is an artist who works solely with photographic film. His work has been shown with Localhost gallery, Valentine Editions, Light Leaked, Editions l'Heliotrope, Hand Magazine, Humble Arts Foundation, Noice Magazine, Float Magazine and Lumen London. In 2018 he completed two residencies. He lives and works in Northampton, UK.
Statement: The images from this project are comprised of photographs I made using a small model of the moon. I was able to suspend the moon in my studio, photograph it with unfamiliar backgrounds as well as staging my own lunar eclipse.
M. Apparition
Bio: M. Apparition is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, drawing, and experimental photography. A native New Yorker, Apparition studied at Fakulta Akademie Múzických Umění (FAMU), Prague, Czech Republic and the International Center of Photography, New York, NY. Work has been shown in New York, San Francisco, Rochester, and Baltimore; Florence, Italy, and the Lishui and Yixian Photo Festivals in China. Images have been published in numerous print and online magazines. Apparition currently lives and works in New York City.
Statement: In my series "A Portion of the Universe/The Bright and Hallowed Sky", celestial bodies are depicted in a way that is fictional. This is a personal, imaginary cosmos, created without a camera or a darkroom. The process is of my own devising and is proprietary. Chromogenic paper is essential, so these unique prints are photographs. The heavens belong to all..
Madeline Cass
Bio: mad(eline) cass (b. 1993) is a US-based artist who primarily works within photography, poetry, artist books, painting, drawing, graphic design and tattooing. She earned a BFA in studio art with an emphasis in photography from the University of Nebraska in 2017.
Statement: What does it mean to be a wildfire sun? Beautiful and entrancing and sad and terrifying, all at once. You shouldn’t look but can’t stop looking. Shock and awe. What does this mean for the future? How is it possible to be optimistic? Do you feel it in your lungs? A mirage of sweltering heat, even when the fire is nowhere nearby, reminding us how endlessly we are all connected.
Magali Duzant
Bio: Magali Duzant is an artist and writer whose practice is rooted in both research and process, using photography, writing, installations, and artist books to explore and communicate the ways in which we describe, inhabit, and share experiences on intimate scales both large and small. She is based in NY and Zürich.
Statement: The image submitted is from a project, A Light At the End of the World, tracing the language and phenomena of light in all of its historical, artistic, conceptual and deeply poetic forms through the framework of a 24 hour day. The image is titled ‘Sun on Mars’.
Marco Lorenzetti
Bio: Marco Lorenzetti b. Detroit Marco Lorenzetti received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Michigan School of Art and Design and his Masters of Fine Arts degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work can be found in the permanent collections of The Detroit Institute of Art and Art Institute of Chicago. He was nominated for the Prix Pictet Award in 2014 and 2021. Work from that documentary, Unclaimed Remains, was published in the Prix Pictet book, Disorder, in 2015.
Statement: The inimitable symbolic power of the sun and moon is found here in these five handmade contact prints using traditional large format materials.
Margaret Inga Urías
Bio: Margaret Inga Urías is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist working with photography, ink, and glass to explore the interconnectedness of existence. Focusing on dust, from the cosmic to the quotidian, her work considers how entire worlds come from and return to this generative substance. Interested in the physical laws and circumstances that brought space, time, matter and beings into existence, she creates trace narratives–following the small and invisible over vast stretches of time.
Statement: I’m constructing images of astronomical documents from archival research (lunar samples, moon maps, and sky charts among others) and imagery of natural phenomena, always looking through atmospheric dust and light to study rocks, nearby satellites, terrestrial debris–to understand the interconnectedness of all things, and envision how it all happened: how we went from nothing to something, and how the rocks and dust of that something turned into the sun, moon, planets, and us.
Maria Mavropoulou
Bio: Maria Mavropoulou was born in 1989, she lives and works in Athens, Greece. She is a visual artist using mainly photography while her work expands to new forms of the photographic image, such as VR and screen captured images. Her work and research focuses on the new realities created by the connectible devices and the contradictions between the physical and the digital spaces that we inhabit.She completed her MFA studies in 2018, at Athens School of Fine Arts, from where she got her BA in 2014.
Statement: The sun and the moon are two celestial bodies that dictate many aspects of the life and behaviour of every living creature on this planet. But today there is a new light that has a tremendus influence on us, humans, the light emmited from the connectible devices we use to access the parralel world of the internet.
Mary Pinto
Bio: Originally from the Philadelphia area, Mary Pinto lives and works in Queens, NY. Using alternative processes to evoke a sense of wonder in the natural and built environments, she has exhibited her photograms and collages widely. She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and received her M.F.A. from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.
Statement: During this pandemic year, the natural cycles of night and day, shadow and light, were a comfort, providing rhythm and structure amidst the changes, and I found my garden to be a refuge. Using the sun as my light source, I made these cyanotype photograms as I worked from my home studio. The world, which had seemed to shrink at first, gradually began to expand, and included the sky - the sun and the moon.
Matt Schaefer
Bio: Matt Schaefer (b. 1983) lives and works in San Francisco. Using mostly analog processes, his photographic work focuses on our relationship with time, the landscape, and perspective. His ongoing work, Astroscapes, uses cyanotypes to explore metaphor and point of view in space photography. He has exhibited work in the United States and Japan.
Statement: I am drawn to the wonder, desolation, distance and scale of the photographs produced by the explorations our solar system. By creating these cyanotypes – prints made with the light of the sun – I am exploring how images of stars, planets, moons, and asteroids operate. I am attempting to carry forward their abstract universal shapes, their disembodied point of view, and the echoes of frailty of the highly contingent manner in which they are produced.
Melanie King
Bio: Melanie King is a working class artist and curator, originally from Manchester, UK. Melanie is now based in Ramsgate, Kent, UK. Melanie's work has a specific focus on astronomy, analogue photography and materiality. Melanie is a PhD Candidate at the Royal College of Art (2015-2022). She is a lecturer on the MA programme at the Royal College of Art and BA Photography at Canterbury Christ Church University.
Statement: Melanie King is a visual artist and practice-based researcher at the Royal College of Art. She is interested in the relationship between starlight, photography and materiality. Melanie has produced daguerreotypes and world-record sized cyanotypes exploring the relationship with the Sun and photosensitive material. The purpose of her research is to demonstrate the intimate connection between celestial objects (sun, moon, stars), photographic material and the natural world. Melanie is currently researching sustainable photographic processes, to minimise the environmental impact of her artistic practice.
Michael Darcy
Bio: Michael Darcy is a photographer and bookmaker who explores how form, materiality, and structure impact our experience with content. He thinks through making and each project is a self reflective attempt to grow. Michael was born in Rochester, NY, where he currently works as a preparator for the George Eastman Museum. He received his MFA at the Visual Studies Workshop in 2021, and an undergraduate degree in photography at Fitchburg State University in 2014.
Statement: Paint the Moon’s impetus is a story my parents told me when I was little and asked why the moon was broken. Having noticed the phases of the moon, I was told that my father would get a tall ladder and paint a little bit every night until it was “fixed.” This anecdotal timeline of my father, grandfather, and myself showcases how a family narrative of work ethic glossed over privilege’s role in our success.
Michael Christopher Zuhorski
Bio: Michael Christopher Zuhorski (he/they) was born in 1992 in Detroit, Michigan. His first time traveling and living alone was in 2011 as a lighthouse keeper. Michael received a BFA in photography from the College for Creative Studies, in Detroit, in 2015. Michael is currently an MFA candidate at Syracuse University. His work is concerned with time and identity, gradual change, sustained attention, the relation between seeing and knowing, and seeing in the dark.
Statement: Dusk Studies is a body of photographs concerned with the fragile relation between seeing and knowing. These photographs were made in open spaces in the dark at the end of dusk. I ask viewers to engage with the limitations of sight, where it falls short as a means of orientation or certainty. There is beauty in suspended certainty. I reify this beauty and represent the world as resistant to being fully known or completely comprehended.
Minh Nguyen
Bio: Minh Ngọc Nguyễn, born in 1992, is a Danish-Vietnamese artist living and working in Copenhagen, Denmark. Through the conventions and semantics of commercial photography as well as post-internet tropes, his work examines shapes of national identity, consumerism, taste and fetishisation. He recently released his first book “Sour Sun”.
Statement: The selected image stems from his new book “Sour Sun” and tackle the themes of the open call in different ways; straightforward, figuratively, manipulated etc. The visual effects of the sun, the emitting heat and a mooncake.
Nanci Milton
Bio: Milton is a primarily self-taught photographic artist having had cameras in her hands from an early age due to th influence of her father, a writer and avid photographer. Her university studies took her on a detour to the study of theater and modern dance. It was not long after completing her studies and earning an MFA in Fine Arts that photography kept inserting itself into her her daily life that it became clear where her artistic allegiances lay. Her work is heavily permeated by her training and finds its way into the narrative threads and building blocks of her images, whether they be leaning to conceptualism, still life, or magical realism. She is curious, empathetic to the landscape and the objects we surround ourselves with or choose to discard, and continually looking.
Statement: This image divides into a duo that references the contentious and symbiotic relationship between these two orbs and our life on earth. And then a trio that metaphorically celebrates the romantic relationship we have with them...
Noah Doely
Bio: Noah Doely is a multidisciplinary artist who works with a range of photographic mediums along with elements of sculpture, performance, painting, and video. He is interested in the precarious nature of subjective experience, particularly the range of interpretations that surround natural realities. He first became interested in photography as a tool to capture staged, sculpted vignettes and has worked with photography in many different forms throughout the years, in particular nineteenth-century processes.
Statement: The works in this series are printed as cyanotypes. I am interested in the ways that different forms of photography from different eras mediate and transform the subject matter they depict. In this case, how the Prussian blue inherent to the cyanotype process subverts, enhances, camouflages, or otherwise alters how the images' content is perceived.
Pamela Pecchio
Bio: Pamela Pecchio is a Boston-based artist who works primarily in photography and collage. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Aperture, Daniel Cooney Fine Art, and Wallspace Galleries in New York, as well as International Art Camp in Beijing, China, the Amsterdam DreamBike Festival, and Köeln Art in Cologne, Germany. She is the author of two books -- eight, an artist’s book published by Nexus Press, and 509, a limited edition monograph published by Daniel 13 Press. Permanent collections include the Yale University Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Pamela is a founding member of Boston-based photography collective Too Much Light.
Statement: This work was made in Crescent Beach, FL on the occasion of the total solar eclipse of August 2017. Title, "Solar Eclipse, 2017."
Parsley Steinweiss
Bio: Parsley Steinweiss was born and raised in NYC. She received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA from SUNY Purchase. Parsley Steinweiss is an artist and curator whose work deals with the photographic image both materially and conceptually. She has exhibited at a number of galleries including Transmitter Gallery and Black Ball Projects. Her curation projects include shows at SPRING/BREAK Art Show. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Statement: A photograph at its most basic level, is a record of light. In this series, Parsley photographs light phenomena to investigate how we see and how the camera sees, charting the distance between us and our representations. This work also investigates the photo as an object which further allows for an exploration into ideas of perception, materiality, color, light, space and illusion.
Patrick Morarescu
Bio: Patrick Morarescu is a German photographer and visual artist who lives and works between Berlin and Mallorca. His creations refresh and provoke, tirelessly questioning boundaries between the human body and the world around it. He never tires of experimenting to create images in which it is possible to see the world from a different perspective. In so doing, the boldness of his research is never monotonous.
Statement: Under the sun me and the moon / United melting / To Eclipse high noon / Grey darkness in bloom / Will find it‘s way soon / To me the being / In The Sun under the Moon.
Qiren Hu
Bio: Hu Qiren (b. 1983) is a visual artist whose practice explores the myriad forms of image making, incorporating a wide range of media, including photography, video, installation and performance. Expressing a vibrant visual vocabulary inspired by his own identity and tradition, Qiren synthesizes cultural binaries, while incessantly challenging notions of authenticity, belief and value systems. Qiren completed his MFA in Photography and Related Media at Parsons The New School for Design in 2015.
Statement: On Boxing Day in 2019, I captured a sequence of an annular solar eclipse using a home-made viewing apparatus and my vintage Polaroid camera. The resulting set of Polaroid films were then digitally scanned and enlarged via large-format printing. I have always thought of an eclipse akin to a master calligrapher at his pinnacle. For 2 mins that eventful afternoon, spectators watched as a perfect circle 'draws' to a close and at that moment, one could almost enter the spiritual realm of infinity, emptiness and void.
Quinquennio Collective
Bio: Il Quinquennio is a collective founded in 2015 by Fosca Piccinelli, Sara and Marta Gentile: two photographers and a graphic/set designer. It’s an editorial project, a periodical searching tool, a collective memory made of found images. It’s a way to map the unmappable, to find a path in a reality filled with images. Our goal is to inspire people, bringing them into visual stories that convey a sense of amazement and wonder.
Statement: De-sidera is a navigational star chart with the aim to lead you into a sky made up of real and metaphorical images of stars and planets taken out from the internet. You can browse this visual universe, you can lose yourself travelling to the moon, you can face the sun, you can discover a new constellation that will help you to find your way. Make a wish.
Race Dillon
Bio: Race Dillon is currently an MFA candidate of photography at the University of New Mexico. He found photography through a desire to capture memories with his friends in his hometown of Snoqualmie, Washington.
Statement: With clear skies almost all year round, New Mexico is a place of intense sunshine and bright moonlight. These photos are the beginning of a series that contrasts the two. The desert is photographed under moonlight, which transforms the spaces into their own lunar landscapes. These landscapes are juxtaposed with portraits made under mid-day sunlight. This lighting is typically harsh in nature, but one can also find warmth and tenderness amidst the glare of the desert sun.
Riley Goodman
Bio: Riley Goodman inquires folklore, American history, and humankind's relationship with the environments they inhabit in an effort to understand what endures, and how this endurance exists in relation to his own presence in the canon. By building narratives that create an ever-occurring amalgamation of time, Goodman encourages the viewer to question the tenants of authenticity, leaving 'historical truth' in an undisclosed middle ground. Goodman’s work has appeared in Time, Vice, and Oxford American, among other outlets.
Statement: This image comes from my series, Cornelia's Living Room, which I began in the summer of 2018 while living and working in Scottsdale, Arizona. The change from East Coast, where I grew up, to Southwest opened my eyes to the vastness of a different ecosystem and the way the sun and moon both change the quality of images made there. Additionally the otherworldly nature of the environment forever ties it to notions of outer space and life beyond us.
Robert Canali
Bio: Robert Canali (b.1988) graduated from York University in 2011, where he received his BFA in photography. The Canadian artist is currently based in San Francisco, California. Canali has exhibited in Canada, France, Belgium, the United States, and Australia. His work explores the mystery and beauty of the photographic medium, a study in themes like permanence, fragility, and individual perception. His concepts are realized as photographs, sculptures, installations, and books.
Statement: This work considers inherent qualities of the photographic medium. Physical and chemical aspects are addressed in a study of the unique character of the negative. The echoing moon can be viewed as a reminder of the obsessive ritual of picture taking. It is the camera and negatives ability to skew and abstract that provides an opportunity for us to consider something as familiar as the moon in an unfamiliar way.
Rory Blair
Bio:
Statement: The smoke from the Australian bushfires of 2020 as seen from a New Zealand sunset. A foreboding moment.
Sandrine Elberg
Bio: Sandrine Elberg is born in France. Lives & works in Paris. Photographer and visual artist ; graduated of a Master degree level from Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-arts in Paris (2003), MFA Digital Media Art at Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design in Vancouver (Canada) in 2001 and a second-year university level at Sorbonne (1997). The artist establishes a poetic relationship between the myth and iconography of the cosmos and its elements, where true and false aspects intertwine between fiction of appropriation and a distant fascination. Influenced by the Surrealists, she experiments with the consistency of the photographic medium, expanding its technical and aesthetic possibilities. Her family background is a source of constant inspiration and questioning, as my father, an aerospace engineer, spent many years working on the Ariane V rocket, in France. The artist is inspired in search of territories, hostile climates to create lunar photographs from our collective imagination. When she is not traveling, she works in the darkroom of her art studio to make light and chemical experiments. She has participated in more than one hundred exhibitions (gallery, museum, fair, festival) in France, in Europe and in United States, Russia, Korea, Singapore, Greece and Peru for example. After her first photobook "Cosmic", Sandrine Elberg has published in 2019 "M.O.O.N" her second monograph dedicated to Valentina Terechkova, the first woman in Space. These books also marks the fifty years of man's first step on the Moon on July 21, 1969.
Statement: Any means are good to go to the moon, with a high-tech shuttle or through fiction, by science or fantasy transport. Sandrine Elberg loves the stars, the conjunction of the infinitely large and the infinitely small, the atoms from which she, a small planet in search of its cosmic origins, proceeds. For her, the moon is not an end in itself, It is a field to explore, on surface and in depth, but also from which to set out again further, into the unknown. In her luggage, since time has reversed, a few books by Jules Verne and pieces of film from Voyage dans la Lune. To all these questions, Sandrine Elberg answers M.O.O.N., i.e. a book as a cockpit traveling through the confines, a research module made of dream crystals, star dust, walls of stalactites and cracked icebergs, of anthropomorphic rocks and collapsed temples. Fabien Ribery.
Sean Ellingson
Bio: Sean Ellingson is an American photographer currently based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Statement: 𝘔𝘰𝘰𝘯𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘦 𝘖𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘛𝘸𝘰 𝘗𝘢𝘳𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘔𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴 is a yearlong photographic exploration that closely examines the offbeat urban landscape and inhabitants of Los Angeles, California. My engagement with the city began when I relocated to Southern California after living abroad in Hong Kong for nearly five years. Drawn to the uncanny details of the city, I began to document LA every day for one year as a remedy to help ease the odd transition I was experiencing.
Shaina Nasrin
Bio: Shaina Nasrin is a photographer and multimedia artist of Iranian descent currently based in Pennsylvania. Nasrin's practice is primarily autobiographical and intimately deals with themes of ritual, grief, family, and the complexities of identity and home space.
Statement: “Two Full Moons in Aquarius” visualizes the rare consecutive full moons in Aquarius that occurred in late summer 2021. Emanating a unique and bold energy similar to those nights, this cosmic portrait is based on a print I originally created in 2016 that utilizes the chromoskedasic sabattier technique. This ritualistic lack of control in process, reminiscent of the emotional release often felt during a full moon, reveals the beauty in trusting the unknown.
Sharon Lee Hart
Bio: Sharon Lee Hart is a D.C. born artist whose photo-based work explores links between humans, non-human animals, and the natural world. Hart’s work has been exhibited throughout the US and internationally. In the last few years she has been an artist-in-residence at The Studios of Key West, Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, and Joshua Tree National Park. Hart maintains an active studio practice and is an Associate Professor of Art at Florida Atlantic University.
Statement: What remained with me months after being in residence at JTNP was the intense sun and vibrant color in the fall desert landscape. The filters merge with the photo to represent my experience and to make the analog image-making process visible.
Shawn Bush
Bio: Lens-based artist Shawn Bush (he/him/his) grew up in Detroit, MI, a city whose civic history and geographic location have profoundly influenced the way he thinks about physical space within American sociopolitical and socioeconomic landscapes. His photographs and collages are responsive to over-built systems, failing icons, and collapsing mythologies. He is a 2021 Aperture CreatorLabs recipient and Wyoming Arts Council fellow. Bush is the founder of Dais Books and Assistant Professor of Photography at Casper College.
Statement: This picture is from a series titled Angle of Draw, which examines the intersections of power, sustainability, and whiteness in the United States through the lenses of the natural landscape and propaganda imagery. This image was made in response to my feelings as an artist to the location I am currently in, Wyoming, USA – one of the highest producers of fossil fuels nationally. The mirror, or signal mirror, is a distress call for help.
Silvana Gajardo
Bio: Experimental photography, Chile 1985. Since she was 18 years old, she has led an absolutely nomadic life, not so much on a whim, but because of the complications that arise to survive in Chile as a mother (x3) and an artist. She currently lives and works in Ghent, Belgium, after having been installed in various places such as Chiloé, Santiago, Andorra, Ibiza, Canary Islands, always varying in work activities and undertakings marked by an artistic accent. She is an Industrial Designer and a Master in Research and Photographic Creation from the Finis Terrae University, Santiago de Chile. She currently produces work both in her photo in her studio and in a dark room, she offers workshops on analog photography, alternative photochemical processes and is active in art therapy volunteering. During the last 10 years she has participated in various solo and group exhibitions in Chile and Europe.
Statement: I have the prodigious possibility to create, recreate myself. Enter the chaos and like a seed once it begins its germination process, allow the chaos to guide me in that dark night where all possible images are manifest to express the sky that I carry inside.
Stacy Mehrfar
Bio: I am a first-generation Iranian-American. Growing up with clashing cultures, I learned social structures and managed assimilation challenges early in life. In 2008, I unexpectedly immigrated to Australia; shifting continents further complicated my self-perception. A heightened sense of estrangement returned when I moved back to the US after a decade abroad. This personal history grounds my practice. My photographs, video installations, and photobooks address 'community,' mainly looking at the symbiotic relationship between the individual and the group and how landscape forms identity.
Statement: Living during a pandemic has taught us that we do not exist solely to benefit our individual lives, that we must consider our collective interdependency. As we enter a post-pandemic chapter, we need to focus on togetherness to survive. In my most recent photographic series, Down in the Forest, We Sing a Chorus, I look to the natural world to appreciate their systems of reciprocity. These photographs of body and nature look closely at the symbiosis of nature's ecosystems and emphasize interconnection, transformation, and fragility.
Stephanie O’Connor
Bio: Stephanie O'Connor was immersed in photography at around 15 years old due to being a terrible painter but an avid image maker. Through many years of digital compositing and collage, she found her niche in the realm of post and grade work to create new worlds, using the camera as a vehicle to achieve this desire. O’Connor’s images often work in the realm of the imagined site; simulating an impossible realism through the lens.
Statement: ‘A thumping in the distance’ douses the world in a deep blue black, situating the series in mythical silver-cyan moonlight. The images themselves are visual trickery; shot in broad daylight to stay within the realms of safety. The sun glides into a moonlit state, becoming an iridescent liquid over rocks, ocean and leaves. ‘A thumping in the distance’ extends these aims to a phenomenological level - Its impact is that of a dreamlike, half-lit memory.
Su Ji Lee
Bio: Su Ji Lee is a Brooklyn-based artist passionate about photography and installation. Captivated by the dominant factual qualities embedded in a photographic medium, the subject matters are carefully chosen for constructing a whimsical spatial language. Starting her photographic journey from Seoul, South Korea, Su Ji leads distinct narratives of one’s occupation with a fresh perspective.
Statement: The other night, the sun dissolved into my gaze and the moon settled on the blind spot. How we reciprocate the existence of celestial bodies is fairly intuitive yet forever ineffable. Here, the selected works seek to translate our bodily experiences into tactile familiarity. By following the traces of the sun and moon much closer to the ground, the images are marked with their dusks.
Tabita Hub
Bio: Tabita Hub, born 1988 near Munich, is an artist based in Berlin. After her studies in graphic design she graduated from Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie in Berlin 2017. In her work she dissects humans including herself and organic and inorganic structures. She is mostly inspired by natural surfaces and the human psyche. Her working material ranges from analog black and white square format film over square instant film to her old smart phone.
Statement: It seems like I'm more inspired by the moon than the sun. It is actually one of my greatest desires to touch the satellites sandy surface. The moon is soft and nice. Unlike the sun we can directly look at it. When the moon shines during the day it could also be a science fiction scenery. My collages and photographies are a collection of moon related imagery from the past years.
Tim Pearse
Bio: Tim Pearse is a fine art and portrait photographer based in Bristol, UK. Pearse's artistic practice 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.
Statement: "Astronomies" is a series of cameraless photographs made using the luminogram process. They are representative of a yet to be made journey to a distant planetary body; time and space make way for a horizonless future, dawn without dawn, stars wheel in bright solitude.
Toby Zeng
Bio: Toby Zeng was born in Beijing, China in 1998. His passion for photography started to blossom during 10th grade when he began taking photos with his iPhone. He studied Photography at Bard College in Dutchess County, New York. Toby is currently based in China where he works on commissions and personal projects.
Statement: An exploration of photographic seeing through vertical composition.
Todd Forsgren
Bio: I use photography to examine themes of ecology, perceptions of landscape, and social justice while striving to strike a balance between art history and natural history. To do so, I employ a range of approaches, from documentary strategies to experimental techniques. Community is very important to me. I teach at Rocky Mountain College where I also serve as the director of the Ryniker-Morrison Gallery. I'm proud to be a cofounder of Spectacle Box and AgX as well as a member of both Atlantika Collective and f/4.5 Collective. I live in Montana and spend lots of time in Los Angeles.
Statement: Part of the reason that eclipses are so spectacular on the planet earth is due to the relationship it has with two other celestial bodies: the sun and the moon. Though sun’s diameter is 400 times that of the moon, the sun is also 400 times farther away than the moon. Thus, from earth, they have the same relative size. It’s quite a miraculous coincidence. One can create a similar relationship between the sun and a clementine (the smallest of the mandarin oranges, at approximately five centimeters). The clementine needs to be about five meters away from a viewer on the surface of the earth. I tried to create a solar eclipse with a clementine on a bright sunny day on the beach that is just west of LAX airport. I made 999 attempts (that is, tossing up the clementine 999 times and taking a photo).
Trevor Schmidt
Bio: Trevor Schmidt is a self-taught abstract photographer. He lives and works on Canada’s west coast, where his art is inspired by and pays tribute to the coastal waters and rainforests of the Pacific Northwest. Trevor’s role as a crime analyst demands frequent exposure to the most grievous qualities of humanity. Immersion in photography art is Trevor’s antidote to the harmful mental health impacts of a career devoted to preventing the immorality and suffering of others.
Statement: This photo is from my ongoing series "Galileo’s Reverie". Although Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei is most widely known for his celestial discoveries and other contributions to science, he was also a gifted visual artist. This project combines long exposures with purposeful motion to present imaginings from the right side of Galileo’s brain – paintings in which our Earth’s moon is both his palette and his muse.
Vaughan Larsen
Bio: Vaughan Larsen is a Milwaukee-based artist whose work is used as a vehicle to explore their queer identity through photographic self-portraiture. They are currently on a country-wide road trip, meeting beautiful new people, seeing gorgeous landscapes, and missing loved ones from home.
Statement: This self-portrait with a loved one is a personification of the gendered landscape, and a celebration of our love.
William Mark Sommer
Bio: William Mark Sommer (b. 1990) is a film photographer residing in Sacramento, California. Mark has earned his BFA in Photography from Arizona State University and has exhibited over the United States and Internationally. Within Mark’s photographic series he utilizes a long-term post documentary mode of storytelling to explore themes of human nature, preservation and empathy.
Statement: Watching the sunset became my daily meditation on time in the confides of being at home during the Stay-at-home regulations. These meditations brought me ease but also inspired me to embracing this moment and examine the prospects of time within photography. In utilizing multiple exposures and extended long exposures I sought to discover the depths that time has on us through this still medium.
Willy Lamers
Bio: Willy Lamers (1981) is drawn to the still moments and perfect compositions when shape, colour, light and a feeling come together to create that image, a little bit different than we usually see the world. After working as a Graphic Designer in London, Willy moved to Rotterdam (NL) in 2016 where she nowadays works as an artist, photographer, designer and bike messenger. She loves being outdoors and active and most work arises on the go between A and B.
Statement: I am fascinated by the graphic lines and shapes nature creates for us. Sunset in Hook of Holland. Sunrise and sunsets are beautiful and I often enjoy them but that's not what I want to show the world through my images. I'd like to add the extra layer.
Zack Carroll
Bio: Zack Carroll is an artist from Connecticut who received a BFA from the Hartford Art School. He developed an ongoing series, Spacial Recognition, as a step towards minimalism while using photo abstraction. In challenging the photographic plane, Zack often questions the dialectic boundaries between now the positive & negative, the internal & external, and the real & the imagined.
Statement: I’m enamored by the moon. A reminder of the world’s ingredients. The controller of oceans. The nightlight that leads us through the dark. The moon pulls me in. Only to leave once more. The closest I’ll be to touching the moon, is when our shadow casts on its surface. The closest I’ll be to seeing the moon is through photography. I accept it as a place forever out of reach, until the sun rests again.