We are in the final week of our tenth annual summer juried + invitational exhibition, UnBound! We’re making one last push to get to our goal of $10k so we can continue to support the artists participating in this year’s show. Continue below to hear from Founder Gordon Stettinius and Director Ashby Nickerson about the origins and mission of our beloved summer group show:

TRANSCRIPT

A: Hi, I’m Ashby Nickerson, Director of Candela Gallery

G: I’m Gordon Stettinius, Founder of Candela Gallery

A: We are here today during the last week of the current UnBound! exhibition. this is year ten of the for us doing the unbound show each summer, which is a big deal. We’re here to talk a little bit about how you can support the show as we enter our last week. We’re about 70% of the way to reaching our goal $10,000 of this year to purchase work directly from the show, to support artists, and to continue to build a collection we’ve started. This is a really unique program for us – this is really different from the other exhibitions we do throughout the rest of the year, so we thought we’d take a minute to explain how this exhibition came about and answer some questions we get from a lot of you guys about how we go about acquiring work as a commercial gallery in a very “non-profity” way. Gordon, do you want to talk a little bit about the origin?

G: Sure. Back in 2000-something, for some years, there was a photo group in Houston that was a patron effort by the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. They basically would put together a cool dinner, and event, and exhibition and invite artists to submit to this program. Then through the course of the evening, they would raise a certain amount of money and then decide, democratically, how to spend that money. They developed a “flight” of acquisitions that would then go directly to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. As a photographer, that always appealed to me; I thought it was a cool opportunity. Jump-cut some years later when I founded Candela, I wanted to do something like that as well. Just having an exhibition that buys work is unusual, and I think that’s really one of the reasons why people have so many questions about this. But we’ve changed it a little bit. It’s really a little more autocratic – originally it was myself, then it was myself and Amy Ritchie, now it’s myself, Ashby Nickerson, and Whitney Cole, our Gallery Coordinator. We go through the 700 submissions, which is like 2500 images, and we put together really an eclectic, but kind of an awesome show. It’s always good.

Now, weirdly, it’s kind of a non-profit part of our program and I think that’s part of the confusion. We raise money, and we’re a for-profit gallery, which trips some wires in a weird way. Basically we designed this show so it’s a commercial effort: you can come in and appreciate a piece of work, buy that work, and Candela gets 50% and the artist gets 50% – business as usual. But, if you are interested in the fundraising aspect of this exhibition, we throw a great party historically. We have back alley chicken, we have laser cake, we have all the trappings of an unusual event, try to entertain you, and tease some money out of you. We’ll spend all of the money from those fundraising events on acquiring work. Now that collection number is something like 91 pieces now, and we have promised to donate this growing collection to a notable permanent collection. So, it’s direct support of photographers, and it is something we feel is very good Karma, however confusing it may be.

A: This show is one of the only open calls we do each year, and we put out the call in February and it’s free to submit. This year we got close to 700 submissions, which is really exciting for us. Each year we’ve seen that number progressively go up, which is awesome. We invite a couple artists and the rest are juried in. It really is an eclectic show, we treat this as a true survey of what’s going on in the medium and how people are using photography. It’s a real range of processes and techniques. So we hope you guys will support us and help us get to our goal of 10,000 this year. Like I said, we’re about 70% of the way there.

If you’re interested in supporting and helping us get to that 10k, you can visit our website, candelagallery.com, and we have numerous giving levels where you can support, as well as swag you can purchase - we have a Candela tee shirt, a Candela hat, we’ve put together a catalog for the show this year. All of that money goes towards raising funds to buy work.

G: There you have it.

A: Thanks for tuning in, we hope you’ll support