UnBound12! Artist Features: VI
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.
ALEXA CUSHING | BOSTON, MA
Headlights, 2022.
Archival Pigment Print, 24 x 20 inches.
Edition #1 of 5. $1200, Framed.
The Bridgewater Triangle is a region in southeastern Massachusetts that has been home to countless paranormal experiences, dating back to colonial times. This 200 square mile area is centered around Hockomock Swamp. Hockomock, in Wampanoag, means “place where spirits dwell”. Colonists simply referred to this area as “Devil’s Swamp”. Reports include sightings of unexplained ghostly figures, mysterious lights, UFOs, large prehistoric birds, and Native American monsters. The area is also a hotspot for crime, including cult activity and a string of gruesome murders in the 70s and 80s. Locals who are interested in this folklore believe that the area is an otherworldly portal into another dimension. Other believers claim that the history of war between Native Americans and colonists has cursed the land.
My work, Devils Swamp, is an investigation of my home region of Massachusetts. Is this area truly an otherworldly hotspot, or has the folklore of the Bridgewater Triangle become a way to connect and assign meaning to an otherwise wearisome working class community? My images examine
the mythology of this place, and furthermore the residents’ desire to be a part of something greater than themselves.
Alexa Cushing is a photographic artist based in southern Massachusetts. She uses her photographs to explore the mythology of place, creating images that extract a sense of magic from the everyday landscape.
Alexa’s work has been a part of several group exhibitions at galleries and institutions such as The Griffin Museum of Photography, Panopticon Gallery, and the Oregon Contemporary.
Her first solo exhibition was held at Aviary Gallery in the spring of 2019 and featured her project Due West, which examined the mythology of Los Angeles as a dream factor.
Alexa’s work has been featured within various independent publications such as Rental Magazine, Incandescent Zine, and Polaris Magazine and online publications such as Lenscratch, Humble Arts, and C-41 Magazine.
Alexa holds a BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design
RILEY GOODMAN | RICHMOND, VA
Anne, 2023.
Archival Pigment Print,
30 x 24 inches. Edition #1 of 5.
$2100, Framed.
Riley Goodman, raised in the Patapsco River Valley of Maryland, inquires folklore, American history, and humankind's relation to the environments they inhabit in an effort to understand what endures, and how this manifests through the passage of time. Goodman juxtaposes the visual interpretation of researched, often folk-based, storytelling with archival imagery and material from his personal collections of artifact and ephemera. When combined, the work depicts a narrative that rather than noting a specific period, creates an ever-occurring understanding of history. By establishing this crafted world, Goodman invites the viewer to question tenets of authenticity, leaving the idea of 'historical truth' in an undisclosed middle ground. Goodman is a BFA graduate of the VCUarts Photography program and his first monograph, From Yonder Wooded Hill, was published in 2022.
JONNA MCKONE | BALTIMORE, MD
ruby, from the series, radiant forces I, 2022.
Archival Pigment Print, 16 x 20 inches.
Edition of 10. $1100, Framed.
first last light ruminates on how the earth holds time, keeping a record of its own histories through fossils, waterways, soil, and the shifting atmospheric qualities of a place. I began photographing this series during the quiet moments I sought throughout the pandemic, thinking about how fragile and porous our bodies are, embedded in the environment and built places. This work threads dreams and myths, everyday life, the unpredictability of the weather, data collection, detritus left in public parks, and the life cycles of plants, rocks and animals.
Traditional landscape photography frames nature as an aesthetic resource, with looking and possessing closely entwined. Instead, these works consider the reciprocity of attuning to place and the influences that pervade the living world. I’m interested in photography that expresses things you cannot entirely see in the world, feelings, histories, memories, ghosts, and myths. Usually my work also has a material, conceptual component too - like chemi-lumens, cyanotypes or collages. This project expresses geologic time through monochromatic images, rocks, vegetation and horizon lines and concepts of reciprocity by exploring the dominance of vision in the photograph. Producing prints in the color darkroom, which must be made in complete darkness (unlike a black and white darkroom) was where color emerged as an animating force. At first I had a series of images painstakingly choreographed in the darkroom with masks and multiple exposures, but I began to look at the series in terms of color and shape relationships. By cutting into an image (and thus the perfection and beauty of a single photographic frame), I realized I could speak more directly to some of the bigger questions in ‘first last light’ about how photography historical has framed the land with histories of possession, settling, taking, owning and what is rendered visible and invisible. By permeating the frame itself with fractions of images from the same negative and creating soft, permeable, imperfect edges, I hope to impart an illusory impression that persists in the consciousness.
Jonna McKone is a photographer and filmmaker based in Baltimore, MD. She works with documentary, archives and abstraction to explore connections between landscapes, the body, and memory. Her work has received support from the Rubys Artist Grant, Andy Warhol Foundation, the Baker Artist Awards, the Puffin Foundation, Maryland State Arts Council, the Center for Documentary Studies, and Points North Institute. She has been an artist in residence at Full Circle Fine Art, Monson Arts' Photography Residency, and Platteforum. Her work has been shown in galleries and museums. Alongside her studio practice, Jonna produces independent films.
ANITA KHEMKA & IMRAN KOKILOO | UTTARAKHAND, INDIA
X-Ray, IV, 2017.
Archival Pigment Print, 72 x 36 inches.
Edition #2 of 8 + 2AP. $3200.
This project is a collaboration between Anita Khemka and Imran Kokiloo, who is originally from Kashmir.
Kashmir has been on a boil for over 27 years now and maintains the distinction of being the most militarized zone in the world today. There have been regular uprisings from 1989, and recently in July 2016 in the aftermath of the death of militant, Burhan Wani. This project started with making photographic portraits of victims of the pellet guns during protests, which erupted spontaneously across the South of Kashmir during Buhrani’s funeral procession. These protests gradually spread to Srinagar and other districts. The security forces used a non-lethal crowd-controlling weapon — the pellet gun to control the crowds. These guns are called Pump-action shotguns, also called bird-shots and each cartridge fired using this gun contains over 500 lead pellets. The use of these guns has led to thousands of people receiving pellet injuries; while over 800 have lost their eyesight partially or completely, thousands have these pellets still embedded in their bodies.
The victims of these injuries during protests were rushed to state hospitals and only some pellets that were deemed threatening were removed surgically. According to doctors, it is not possible to remove all the pellets, because of the sheer number of cuts that would be required to remove them as well as the number of people who would require such intervention. The remaining pellets were left within the soft tissues, assuming that they would finally be covered by scar tissues. However, in addition to infecting the tissue, causing immense pain and various complications this can in some cases cause lead poisoning.
The victims of these injuries were treated in state-run hospitals and were not given their medical records other than the discharge summary. This made it difficult for them to seek any treatment outside. We started taking X-rays to help the victims have a record of their injuries and get treatment. We soon realised that these X-rays could be used to construct an X-ray portrait of each person, with each white dot indicating the position of a lead pellet and how they have become a part of the anatomy permanently. To this end, we made these portraits in Photoshop by stitching multiple X-rays of each person to complete the picture.
During our conversations with the pellet victims, the date and precise time of the incident seem to be etched in their memory. This also became the decisive moment when their new anthropomorphological identity was born. What does a person do with the objects lodged inside of her body? How does one deal with security apparatus on heightened alert every time one passes through an airport or a government building because of the alarm raised by these pellets as they pass through the metal detectors? You become a profile that always turns gazes of suspicion. These pellets lodged inside of them are permanent reminders of both the physical and continued mental trauma, not letting the victims move on.
These portraits serve as reminders of the new kind of violence perpetrated by the state on dissent all over the globe as we have seen similar tactics being employed by governments in Chile, the Middle East, and Egypt.
Anita Khemka (b. 1972) studied English Literature at Delhi University and Visual Merchandizing at La Salle, Singapore. Her photographic praxis of over twenty-five years has focused on the lives of socially marginalized and excluded groups and communities. She started collaborating with her partner Imran Kokiloo in 2017 and the duo has since focussed on working on Kashmir. She has exhibited widely in Europe and is engaged with The MurthyNAYAK Foundation to work on PhotoSouthAsia, a site dedicated to South Asian photography practices. She lives in Nainital, Uttarakhand with her partner and two daughters and is represented by PHOTOINK.
Imran B Kokiloo (b. 1978) started photography in 2017 in collaboration with his partner Anita Khemka. Their first series titled Kashmir: Pellet Identity was exhibited at FotoFest Houston (2018) and a print is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He continues to produce work on Kashmir, which he defines as his lifelong endeavour. His work was shortlisted for the Grand Prix Images Vevey, Switzerland (2019). Their work made during the global COVID pandemic, titled Shared Solitude was exhibited at PHOTOINK, New Delhi (2021). The duo was selected for an artist residency program in Switzerland supported by Pro Helvetia (2022). They exhibited their work titled Kashmir: The Making Of A Family Album at the Verzasca Foto Festival (2022), and Kashmir: I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell at the Landskrona Foto Festival (2022). They were nominated for the Magnum Foundation Counter Histories Grant (2022). They have been awarded the Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Grant for Photography 2022 | The Constructed Image for their project titled Tales from Kashmir.
KRISTIN SCHNELL | MECKLENBURG-VORPOMMERN, GERMANY
Breathing light 1, 2022.
Archival Pigment Print, 29.5 x 19.6 inches. Edition #2 of 4 + 2AP. $2200, Framed.
Breathing light 2, 2022.
Archival Pigment Print, 29.5 x 19.6 inches. Edition #2 of 4 + 2AP. $2200, Framed.
Spirituality has been a big factor in my life since my earliest childhood. Colorful church windows, which cast their magic on me through the falling sun, always accompany me as a visual inspiration. Chance determines my life, just as chance determines my pictures.
Birds are often symbols of freedom but frequently live in captivity. There, the life behind bars has little in common with their innate freedom, they can only get a glimpse of the outside world. In my pictures I present birds and their captivity as a symbol of the cage that I, and humans in general tend to put themself in, or are being put in by society, social media and upbringing. Photographing birds allows me to evaluate my own life and to process the struggles I went through in order to liberate myself creatively. They represent a constricted life in a diverse and colourful world. I offer my birds a stage to unfold and create the image through a split second of coincidence.
I as an artist take a step back and leave room for the freedom that I am seeking myself. I build sets out of wood using paint and props. My photos were created in real time and were not subsequently constructed at the computer.
Kristin Schnell is a German, baltic sea-based photographer who creates artificial sceneries for her birds and animals to perform on.
In her pictures, she presents birds, animals, and their captivity as a symbol of the cage that she, and humans in general, tend to put themselves in. The intention of the work is to show the complex and impactful relationship between humans and animals.
KARI VARNER | BINGHAMTON, NY
Monett & Sedalia 1, 2022.
Archival Pigment Print of Image Grown in the Microalgae Chlorella Vulgaris, 18 x 14 inches. Edition #1 of 5.
$800, Framed.
The ongoing series Monett & Sedalia brings nature and living material directly into the formation of the work. The fouling of water and coastal erosion present challenges on scale that seem impossible to approach. These 4 x 4” photographs grown in a microalgae and preserved through photo documentation present these challenges on a personal scale.
In 2018 I received a Puffin Project grant to photograph two Tyson Chicken plants and the surrounding waterways in southern Missouri. Tyson chicken is one of the largest contributors to the annual algal bloom and subsequent dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico and the two sites in southern Missouri have experienced acute or sustained environmental calamities as a direct result of the local plants. While traveling through and photographing the two towns, the scenes I encountered were alarmingly benign and the resulting images felt far removed from the collective weight of their environmental impact. Until 2021 the series lay dormant.
In 2021 I began to grow the images from this series in the microalgae chlorella vulgaris. The emergence of the gates of the Monett Tyson Plant in Image 2 and Tyson Sedalia water treatment plant in Image 1 points directly to the effects of Tyson’s production. While growing these images in algae, which take roughly one week to appear, I fed them nitrogen rich fertilizer with a pipette several times a day in order to sustain their growth. Through this process of cultivation, I and my work were implicated in the cycle of blooming and eventual death of the algae.
Kari Varner is a visual artist working in Binghamton. Her explorations of the landscape often take the form of photographs, installations and ephemeral works. She graduated with a BFA in Electronic Media Arts Design from the University of Denver and went on to complete her MFA in Visual Art at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions abroad, including the Palace and Museum Bourbon del Monte in Monte Santa Maria Tiberina, Italy; San Marco Basilica in Florence, Italy; and Kunst(seug)haus Rapperswil Museum and Kammgarn West Schaffhausen in Switzerland. Previous exhibitions in the United States include the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, the Anderson Ranch Arts Center and Belmont University.
Although a longtime resident of San Francisco, Venezky has recently relocated to Michigan to study towards an MFA in Photography at Cranbrook, thirty years after receiving his design degree from the same institution. He is using this time to make his work a catalyst for further reflection, while exploring its connections to the adjacent practices of architecture, drawing, and sculpture.
MICHAEL YOUNG | SCARSDALE, NY
Leather on Leather, February, 2021.
Archival Pigment Print, 28 x 24 inches.
Edition #1 of 5 + 2AP. $1950, Framed.
Hidden Glances is a series of photographs made from vintage gay pornography calendars published when I was beginning to recognize my sexuality as a youth until I came out in 2000. Before then, I skirted mention of my sexuality by hiding behind my studies, feigning interest in girls, and making failed attempts to fit in with the rest of the boys.
Calendars chronicle and mark time. In this work, they represent the long period in my life when others assumed I was straight, or I was told that being gay was wrong. Ironically, the men in these calendars portray sexualized heterosexual archetypes that many in the gay community have appropriated. These "manly" men that society was trying to train me to become ultimately became the men I longed to look at and galvanized my true identity.
Each image is made by hand cutting a figure from his scene, layering him over another month’s image, and then re-photographing the new composition. By eliminating the presence of exposed skin in the top layer, one muscular silhouette becomes a window that both reveals and conceals to create tension between the two layers. Ultimately the lack of depth creates compressions of space that serve as a metaphor for all those years when I wanted to look at other guys and could only risk taking quick glimpses because I was afraid that my gaze would linger too long and expose my homosexuality.
Michael Young is a lens-based artist whose work deals with masculinity, personal identity, and memory. He is a Top 10 winner of LensCulture Critics’ Choice 2022, a Top 50 artist in Photolucida’s Critical Mass 2021, and a winner of Feature Shoot’s 2021 Emerging Photography Award.
Young’s work has been exhibited in groups shows at the Preus Museum in Norway, in Public Record: Portraits of Affection and Intimacy at LACP, Center Forward 2022 at Center for Fine Art Photography, Context 2022 at Filter Photo, New Photography III at Academy Art Museum, International Juried Show at Center for Photographic Art, and Conversations with the Archive at SE Center for Photography.
Images from Hidden Glances have been published in Musée Magazine, Issue No. 26: Spaces; Der Greif, issues #14 and #15; and Fisheye Magazine, Nº53: Énigme. Online features, articles, interviews, and shows include LensCulture, Humble Arts Foundation, Fisheye Magazine, Fraction Magazine, Feature Shoot, The Guardian, Float, and F-Stop Magazine.
AMY YOSHITSU | BERKELEY, CA
We Made It (San Bernardino County, CA), 2021. Archival Inkjet Print Mounted on Aluminum, 18 x 24 inches. Edition #1 of 6. $3000.
Since 2015, I have sewn 3D paper assemblages and their resulting images from printed photographs I have taken in places I have lived and visited. As an Asian-American human, I identify as being of the diaspora and a product of assimilation culture. I believe what we see around us—the landscape and buildings, the types of labor and activities, the aesthetic and technological choices and conditions—plays a role in who we are while our lineages inform how we make sense of it all. I have lived my life walking and weaving within urban spaces of the US while psychologically contending with generational traumas, motherlands (China and Japan) as simultaneously foreign and integrated, and my own position within histories of speculation, hierarchical race creation and colonialism. By photographing and sewing together places from all over the world that I have occupied or inhabited, I create sculptures honoring the manifestations of histories, shared needs, connected conditions. The resulting sculptures are psychogeographic maps that miniaturize and deconstruct structured space—a product of human labor, the authority of financialization, and modern survival.
The themes that connect my work are the toxic—and ultimately futile—desire for control and the resulting hierarchical structures that are borne from human fear and trauma. The amalgamation of twisted and contorted images of human-built interventions displayed on delicate, biodegradable material speaks both to the fragility of our physical world and to the swirl of emotions and ideas entangled in our complex society. The placements of these objects, in both real and distorted manners into public and infrastructural landscapes, ask the viewer to consider the details of their surroundings, the inequitable structures that provide our everyday lives, and that our attempts to control each other and our environments are at the core of the crisis.
Amy Yoshitsu (b. 1988), she/they, is a sculptor, designer, and socially engaged artist living and working in their hometown, Berkeley, CA. Yoshitsu’s work has been shown across the US and internationally. Their debut New York solo exhibition, “Amy Yoshitsu: Hedges and Ledgers”, opened February 2023 at Satchel Projects in Chelsea, New York. Their work has been included in group shows at Manifest Gallery (Cincinnati, OH), Pyramid Atlantic Art Center (Hyattsville, MD), Herter Gallery (UMass Amherst), and Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition (Brooklyn, NY). In 2010, Yoshitsu received an A.B. in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University and then attended the MFA Art program at California Institute of the Arts. Yoshitsu has been in residency at Esalen Institute, the Artist Residency Project at the School of Visual Arts, Kala Art Institute, and will be a resident at the Vermont Studio Center in Spring 2023. Yoshitsu is a co-founder of Converge Collaborative, an artist-led BIPOC workers co-op, digital creative agency and arts collective.
RICHARD FRANCISCO HOWARD | RICHMOND, VA
DÍGAME #2, 2022.
Inkjet Print Tri-Color Image Composed of
3 B&W Negatives, 30 x 24 inches.
Edition #1 of 8 + 2AP.
$1300, Framed.
The process for DÍGAME is a bridge between analogue and digital workflows. Each print is made from three 4x5 black & white negatives. Each negative is shot using a different color filter (in front of the lens). One filter from the RGB spectrum… i.e. the first negative is shot with a red filter in front of the lens and so on. The negatives are developed in a normal fashion then scanned. Once scanned the corresponding negative is used to make up the color channels on a digital file… making black & white images into color. This process was inspired by technicolor. The final layered image is then printed using an inkjet printer on matte paper.
Richard Francisco Howard is a Colombian/American artist, working primarily in photography. He prefers to produce work in a series, this allows for an exploration of subjectivity and experimentation in the conceptual, technical, and aesthetic. There are elements connected with surrealism, dreaming, and identity in the images. Often the compositions will have more than one image to present a complex notion or transmit a specific atmosphere and mood.