UnBound12! Artist Features: III
UNBOUND12!
July 7 – August 12
Join us for a breakdown of our annual juried + invitational photography exhibition. Each week, we’ll share information about our artists and the processes behind their pieces in the show.
SUPPORT THE EXHIBITION:
UnBound! is our “non-profit” play we make once a year, raising money which directly supports artists in the exhibition. Works in the show are available for purchase (like a normal exhibition), but friends can also give to the UnBound! Fund, which will be used by the gallery to acquire select works for the growing Candela Collection. One day, this collection will be donated to a notable arts institution. This year, we’re also hoping to extend the reach of funding, using a portion to help cover return shipments for artists who need it.
This exhibition supports photographers through exposure, but most importantly through collecting. If you purchase a piece, you are directly supporting that artist and adding to your personal collection; if you give to the UnBound! Fund, you are allowing an artist to be acquired for a permanent collection, or helping to cover an artist’s exhibition expenses. No matter what, your funds support an UnBound12! artist.
ELIZABETH CLARK LIBERT | BOSTON, MA
Boy Crazy, 2023.
Color Printed, Swiss Bound Photo Book, 11.25 x 7.5 inches, 120 pages. Edition of 300. $45.
By The Bougainvillea, 2022.
Archival Pigment Print, 40 x 30 inches. Edition #1 of 3. $3500. UV Coated, Wooden Hangers.
“My sons are beautiful creatures, but I worry they might become monsters one day.”
I recognized this fear while sifting through snapshots of my sons. A swell of nausea hit me as the face of a boy I was traumatized by in college flashed before my eyes, through my children’s faces. Something about their similar physical appearance, style, and potential entitlement aligned in my vision. To my horror, I realized my sons could become just like him.
'Boy Crazy' is the creative result of confronting painful sexual experiences from my adolescence and breaking generational trauma in an effort to become a better mother for my two sons. Through an interdisciplinary collection of new and archival photographs, diaristic texts, digital collages, emails and interviews, I share my story and bring attention to questions regarding loss of innocence, sexual assault, and personal agency.
The experience of making this work has granted catharsis, forgiveness, and awareness. Ultimately, it planted the seeds of a fledgeling confidence as a female, artist, and mother. I hope that it can help others with the same, as well as contribute to modern conversations about sexual trauma and practices for a more empathetic world.
Elizabeth Clark Libert creates photo-based projects that examine themes both autobiographical and psychoanalytical in nature. Focused on subjects close to home, Libert reconsiders stages of life through a variety of visual and contextual approaches. The artwork is vulnerable, revealing introspective and extrospective observations of relationships and cultural influences from her immediate world.
Libert received a BA in Fine Art from Amherst College and an MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts. Images from her MFA thesis received the Photo District News Student Award and the Magenta Foundation Emerging Artist Award. Since then, her artwork has been exhibited nationally and is held in both private and public collections, including the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art. Print and online publications that have featured Libert’s work include T: The New York Times Style Magazine, The New Yorker Photo Booth, Mockingbird, and Lenscratch. Her first monograph, Boy Crazy, was published 2023 by Workshop Arts, and is currently shortlisted for the Rencontres d'Arles Book Awards.
Libert serves on the board of the Griffin Museum of Photography and several local philanthropic committees in the Boston area, where she lives with her family.
ROBIN J NORTH | SAN DIEGO, CA
Queen Cotton, 2020. Platinum Palladium Print on Hahnemühle Platinum Rag, 20 x 16 inches. Edition #1 of 5 + 2AP. $3000, Framed.
This series engages the 19th-century process of platinum palladium prints to depict contemporary African Americans’ re-examination of photography and its intersection with history and the ways the medium was used to perpetuate racist stereotypes concerning Black bodies.
Decolonized Aesthetics is a series that addresses the history of our unpaid labor and the economic engine of cotton to reposition Black bodies, not as stereotypes and the propagandist idea of racial inferiority, but rather reinterprets Black bodies as having agency and control of their own labor. It considers the roots and routes of the Atlantic slave trade and its creolization, creating a fusion of multi-cultures by reconstructing the narrative and positioning Black bodies not as property and labor but as a creolized people of agency with the privilege of owning their own labor. This project considers the Black body and Black agency through the purview of the Black Atlantic world.
The production of the artworks in this series begins with developing the negatives using an Epson printer and Quad-Tone Rip to establish the correct density-blocking curves for a platinum palladium print on Hahnemuhle Platinum Rag paper using LED UV lighting.
Robin J North is an interdisciplinary visual artist based in Richmond, Texas, and San Diego, California. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Houston with a concentration in Photography & Digital Media. He is a Presidential Graduate Research Fellow and Master of Fine Arts candidate in Photography & Multimedia at San Diego State University in San Diego, CA. His work, ranging from alternative photography processes, installation, time-based media, experimental narratives, and mixed and digital media to photographic archives and research, is particularly interested in the relationship between photography and history related to the African Diaspora and African Americans.
After a nearly twenty-year career as a corporate executive and small business owner, in 2016, North’s uncle and father figure James North an artist as well, revealed that he was diagnosed with the debilitating Alzheimer’s disease as a result of the harmful legacy of Agent Orange during his service in the US Airforce during the Vietnam War.
North was asked to use his talents and the transformative powers of the arts to continue to research and tell the story of his family. He was entrusted with his family archives from numerous family sources, a trove of information including the family photo albums, old documents, oral histories, and other collective research, which were a time capsule into his ancestry and his family’s forced migration. His transition from the business world to a journey as a full-time visual artist began.
OSHEEN HARRUTHOONYAN | NEW YORK, NY
Fantasies, 2008. Split Toned Gelatin Silver Lith Print, 19 x 12 inches. Edition #3 of 3. $2300, Framed.
Based in New York, originally from Tehran, Osheen Harruthoonyan is a Canadian-Armenian photographer merging movement with themes of cultural heritage and renewal. Hand printed on gelatin silver paper, his limited-edition prints bring together images of the micro - the sun, Saturn, mount Ararat - with the micro - specks of dust, tiny organisms - to create a new perspective of the world around us, challenging our perception of familiar sights and landscapes through interweaving themes of hope and wonder into the visual narratives we interact with on a daily basis. Osheen’s work has been featured in numerous international exhibits, collections and publications, including the Boston Public Library, Aga Khan Museum, Museum London, The Louvre, Hudson’s Bay New York, as well as features on Vice!, Bravo! Arts, Space Channel, the CBC's "Exhibitionists" and the Marriott Courtyard Hotel in Los Angeles.
“I am a photographer using analogue printing processes to layer and construct narratives that imbue feelings of nostalgia while examining the relationships between landscape, memory, history and identity.
I like to say that I photograph the moments between moments. The Mayan’s speak about God’s breath, that split second of pause before breathing in or out. I like this idea of an in-between state, where more than one possibility can exist. There is a very beautiful tension there, that transition point where shapes take their form. I create this tension with composition, a lot of negative space, texture and deep blacks.
The analog process creates a permanency that, in its own way, is a reminder of the fleeting nature of the very journeys they challenge us to reconsider.
Personal iconography, memories and traces of experience are recurring in my work as I portray the surreal reconciliation of memories shifting over time. My photographs are shot on film that I then manipulate by hand. My work is meant to evoke a dichotomous experience with formal imagery that upon closer inspection reveals an alternative reality; challenging the viewer to reconsider their own relationship to time, space, and ultimately to themselves. I am inspired by the inherent qualities of a material or process. Deciphering the narrative implications and poetic possibilities within these qualities is an important part of my work.”
ROB TARBELL | HARRISONBURG, VA
Imbroglio_1 Brad, 2021. Smoke & Silver Mirroring Verso on Glass, Vinyl, Copper, Brass, Wood; 24 x 18 inches. Unique. $3500, Framed.
While my studio practice originated from traditional drawing and painting, my work grew to balance intent and control with accident and chance and fully embrace my penchant for unorthodox methods and materials, innovation, and integration of disparate influences. Recent work focuses on the manipulation and material associations of ink, porcelain, and smoke. Ink, like smoke, is momentarily suspended before settling and leaving it’s mark behind. Porcelain is simultaneously fragile, strong, and regarded as elegant and pure, while smoke, seemingly dirty, is pure, and has strong associations with transformation, deception, and uncertainty - three central themes running throughout all of my work.
Smoke Process
In 2006, a failed portrait attempt made with cigarettes and liquor collided with a lingering what – if: what if I burned my credit cards and used the smoke to make marks? The first attempt produced an irresistible deep black with seductive gray wisps no brush could deliver. The deep and delicate tones and fugitive marks of the early smokes were akin to charcoal gesture drawings but the work soon progressed towards creating images by indirectly and directly encouraging the direction, flow, and accumulation of the smoke. Drawing remains at the heart of the process, but as the smoke process continues to evolve, it now incorporates elements of collage and photography and adapted aspects of silkscreen technology to transpose original, found, and manipulated images onto paper, canvas, glass, or diamond honed porcelain slabs.
Imbroglios
The Imbroglio series depict shifting points of view of conflicted virtues through the elusive, dynamic, reflective, and translucent properties of smoke, glass, copper, vinyl, and mirror silvering. Both the smoke process and silver mirroring involve directly permitting or preventing accumulation, or by indirectly encouraging or discouraging the flow of smoke and silver on the glass surface. The work intends to both balance accident with control and give permanence to the ephemeral.
Each smoke-rendered subject avoids the viewer’s gaze allowing inspection and interrogation as the image emerges then dissolves amidst fleeting color flourishes and shifting reflective and transparent grounds. Clarity is dependent on position, perspective, proximity, and engagement.
Rob Tarbell is a designer, visual artist, art educator, musician, and preparator based in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He holds a BFA in Painting and Graphic Design from Auburn University, an MFA in Drawing and Painting, and an MS in Curriculum & Instruction in Art Education from the University of Tennessee.
As a designer, he has freelanced and worked with the Ringling Museum of Art in the Exhibition Design and Preparation Department as a graphic designer and exhibition preparator. Recently he has partnered with Artist & Title, working on projects for City Acres grocers in New York City and the luxury watch line, Gunhild.
Over the past 15 years, Tarbell has honed his own fine arts studio practice by developing a unique process based in smoke. His work has been shown in 20 solo exhibitions and more than 75 group exhibitions throughout the United States, Korea, China and England. He has been featured in publications worldwide, including New American Paintings, the Huffington Post UK, Daily Mail UK and the Kultura Zabaikalya in Transbaikalia, Siberia.
In 2007 Tarbell received the VMFA Professional Artist Fellowship and is an artist fellow at VCCA Amherst, VCCA Auvillar, France, and was an artist in residence at the Ragdale Foundation and Hermitage Artist Retreat in Englewood, Fla. His work is included in the permanent collections at the Tampa Museum of Art, Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Art, the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia and Ripley’s Believe It Not in Orlando, Fla.
MARCUS DESIENO | ELLENSBURG, WA
Unknown Migrant, Sex Undetermined, COD Undetermined - Mummified Partial Remains, Their Body Was Found More Than 6 Months After Death, 2022. Archival Pigment Print, 18 x 22 inches. Edition #1 of 9. $850, Framed.
The United Nations has declared the US/Mexico border the deadliest land crossing in the world and a humanitarian crisis. Thousands of men, women, and children have died crossing this border that spans thousands of miles across brutal desert and impassible mountains with harsh climate conditions year-round. The United States government strategically uses this unforgiving terrain to force migrants into an unfamiliar land where they wander for days in the elements through policies of “prevention through deterrence.” Nature is used here as an executioner by proxy.
I photograph the exact locations where the bodies of unknown migrants are found. These people could not be identified and remain anonymous to this day. How do we mourn for those we do not know? These landscape photographs act as a space for somber remembrance and an examination of the cruelty of white supremacy woven into the fabric of the United States. Our colonialist history and imperialist ambitions permeate this land in every mountain and valley. The sites of death are representative of the horrors attached to these oppressive ideologies that continue to guide the US forward into the 21st century.
I use alternative photographic processes in the darkroom to speak to the complex social and political narratives that run through these landscapes. The hazy, impressionistic, and forceful mark-making embedded in these photographic processes act as a metaphor for the physical and psychological violence that these migrants experienced as they perished. These photographs are shot using the wet-plate collodion process and then printed in the darkroom as lith prints.
Immigration is a focal point of political discourse in the US, yet most citizens are unaware of this brutality in the borderlands. Thousands have died and still thousands more remain unaccounted for as they have been lost to these killing fields of the Southwest. As a citizen of this country, I bear responsibility for crimes against humanity perpetrated by my government. These photographs are my call for action.
Marcus DeSieno is a visual artist interrogating institutions of power through the language of photography. DeSieno is particularly interested in how visual technology is used as a tool of oppression by the state and what our future holds as this technology continues to evolve. He received his MFA in Studio Art from the University of South Florida and is currently Associate Professor of Photography at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington.
DeSieno's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Aperture Foundation in New York, Paris Photo, The Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece, The Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki, Finland, Photo Access in Canberra, Australia, and various other galleries and museums. His work has also been featured in a variety of publications including The British Journal of Photography, Boston Globe, FeatureShoot, GUP Magazine, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, National Geographic, PDN, Slate, Smithsonian Magazine, the Washington Post and Wired. DeSieno was named a selection for Photolucida's Critical Mass 50 and an Emerging Talent by Lensculture. His first monograph, No Man’s Land: Views From a Surveillance State, was published by Daylight Books.
LEAH SOBSEY | CHAPEL HILL, NC
The Fall of the Leaf-Wavy Leaf Aster, 2022.
Cyanotype on Glass Backed in 23k Gold,
36 x 27 inches. Edition of 3 + 2AP.
$4000, Framed.
This work comes from my current collaborative installation at The Harvard Museum of Natural History, In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers. The installation considers the impacts of climate change on plants around Walden Pond over the arc of one-hundred-and-twenty years. With a third of the plants in Thoreau’s collection in severe decline or extinct, the installation draws attention to the responses plants are having to significant environmental change.
Thoreau was an enthusiastic collector of botanical samples, which document the world before the intensification of human influence on plant communities and indicative of how the biosphere is responding to climate change. In this exhibition, as an homage to 19th century photographer and botanist, Anna Atkins, a contemporary of Thoreau’s, I focus on cyanotype with its distinctive Prussian blue tone. I am working with this early, 19th century photographic printing process, combining it with contemporary modes of production that include digital technology.
“The Fall of the Leaf” portraits utilize the specimens in the most severe decline at Walden Pond. These works incorporate both cyanotype on glass and 23K gold leaf as a way to elevate the plants, honor the specimens and preserve what is being lost. The reflective gold surface acts as a mirror, the viewer reflected in the artwork as well as the world around them. The cyanotypes are printed directly onto glass in reference to glass-plate photographic negatives dating back as far as the mid-1800’s. They also refer to the 19th century, oval, gilded portrait paintings of Thoreau’s time period.
Leah Sobsey’s multidisciplinary photographic practice reaches into the fields of science, design, installation and textile. Sobsey is also Associate Professor of Photography, curator, and Director of the Gatewood Gallery at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
Her photo-based work explores the natural world through archives and taxonomies with an experimental and materials-based approach to the medium of photography. Often partnering with scientists, she uses historical, scientific, and artistic lens, to understand the connection to plant and animal loss as one indication of the larger climatological perils we face as a species. She is interested in creating a dialog between art and science. She has spent the last decade-plus photographing specimens from National Park and University museum collections across the country to understand climate change and species loss. Sobsey works in 19th-century photographic processes combined with digital technology, specializing in plant-based printing techniques.
Sobsey shows nationally and internationally in galleries, public spaces, and museums; her current exhibition documenting species loss through Henry David Thoreau’s herbarium, In Search Of Thoreau’s Flowers, is open through November 2023 at The Harvard Museum of Natural History. Her recent installations were exhibited at The Weatherspoon Art Museum, The Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, California, Duke Raleigh Hospital, The Nasher Museum of Art, The Moss Center at Virginia Tech, The Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado, The Fence Durham, and Rayko Photo Gallery in San Francisco, California.
Her work is held in private and public collections across the country, including the North Carolina Museum of Art, Bill Gates-Microsoft, Fidelity Investments, Cassihaus, Duke Hospital, Duke Raleigh Hospital, Maine Media College, Rose Community Foundation Denver and many more.
She has been an artist in residence at Virginia Center for the Arts, Dumbarton Oaks, Plant Humanities residency, Ayatana Research residency, Penland, Mother’s Milk, The National Park system, Vermont Studio Center, Hewnoaks artist colony, and Hambidge to name a few.
Her images have appeared in New Yorker.com, the Paris Review Daily, Slate.com, Hyperallergic.com, The Telegraph, and many more. Sobsey is a founding member of LEA, a mission-based company that transforms nature’s fragile specimens into cloth-based modern wearable art for everyday living. LEA is committed to using materials that are natural, locally-produced, and carbon-neutral, and to support other women-owned businesses. Sobsey is also co-founder of the Visual History Collaborative and part of the documentary team that produced the best-selling book, Bull City Summer, published in 2013. Her Monograph, Collections, was released in July 2016 by Daylight Books. She received her BA from Guilford College and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.
LEAH SCHRETENTHALER | MILWAUKEE, WI
A Theory of General Relativity -
In Vain - 1, 2022-23. Flower Ash Fused between Glass Plates with Archival Pigment Print, approx. 10 x 7 inches. Unique. $3500, Framed.
A Theory of General Relativity -
In Vain - 2, 2022-23. Flower Ash Fused between Glass Plates with Archival Pigment Print, approx. 5 x 4 inches. Unique. $2750, Framed.
A Theory of General Relativity -In Vain - 3, 2022-23. Flower Ash Fused between Glass Plates, 6 x 4.5 inches. Unique. $2750 with Ledge.
A Theory of General Relativity -In Vain - 4, 2022-23. Flower Ash Fused between Glass Plates, 12 x 9 inches. Unique. $4000 with Ledge.
These pieces are part of a larger, long term project I’ve been working on about my grandmother, my mother, and myself called “A Theory of General Relativity” - which focuses on the poetic and scientific ways we inhabit space and time, and the complex relationships between mothers and daughters, asking “Do I reap what you sow?”
Photography is intrinsically linked to glass - lenses, sensors, enlargers, scanners, frames - prisms through which we see the world. Light is a wave and a particle. Molten glass is a liquid and a solid. Between forms they rely on artistic and scientific interventions to become something tangible. The way a photograph reveals itself to the maker while submerged in chemicals, is the same magic as gathering glass from the furnace and watching the laws of physics: time, temperature, gravity, and force - transform it. By combining the photographic work I specialize in, with my new studies and experiments in glass, I’m pushing the boundaries of both mediums and emphasizing the intersection between the two. My research delves deeper into these delicate processes conceptually, contextually, and formally.
I am desperate to hold on to things. I try to preserve things that are inevitably slipping through my fingers; my grandmother’s life, my father’s memories, the time I have to spend, the familiar places that I love. As David Foster Wallace said, “Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.” The paradox that the more I try to save something, the more it’s destroyed, relates perfectly to the duality and contraction of the process I’ve been using to make these works. I have been preserving plants from my grandmother’s and mother’s gardens and fusing them between sheets of glass in the kiln - experimenting with timing and temperature to achieve the perfect effect of burning away all the carbon and encasing the white ash of their remains. They become both objects and photographs, positive and negative depending on perspective. They are saved yet completely destroyed, burned away to only ash but held forever protected between sheets of glass. They have the same ephemeral feeling of being neither here nor there.
Madeleine Mae Morris is an interdisciplinary artist specializing in fine art photography. She received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology and Bennington College.