UnBound12! Artist Features: VIII
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.
DANA FRITZ | LINCOLN, NE
Betula papyrifera: an elegy, 2022.
Scroll Format Artist’s Book with Belly Band,
Archival Pigment Prints, Glue, 8 x 4 inches, Closed.
Edition #3 of 4. $700.
Re: forest, 2022.
Digitally Printed, Coil Bound Book with Tri-fold Cover and Insert, 6 x 5 inches, Closed.
Edition #40 of 50. $30.
RE: FOREST
In Re: forest, my photographs from National Forests in the Platte Basin are enclosed by details of historical photographs from the US Forest Service archives. I follow the circular path from where the seeds are sown in Nebraska’s Bessey Nursery to where cones with seeds are gathered and seedlings are planted in Pike, Roosevelt, and Medicine Bow National Forests. Ideas and actions regarding climate change, afforestation, and reforestation span the 19th and 21st centuries here, linking the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains along Platte River tributaries. Bessey Nursery was founded at the turn of the 20th century to produce seedlings for a new forest in the Nebraska grasslands that would change what was considered an unfavorable local climate. Today the same nursery produces seedlings for reforestation in native forests suffering from climate change-driven catastrophic wildfire and beetle-infestation. The Organic Act of 1897 established National Forests in the United States to protect water sources and to provide timber. Because industrial deforestation was already well underway, replacement tree planting was in the plan from the beginning. While many of us may not live near National Forests, we all benefit from their oxygen production, air filtration, carbon sequestration, and watershed protection. We also have a hand in shaping them, whether it is our use of paper and wood, our careless fires, our carbon emissions, or our taxes that fund reforestation projects. This collection of photographs, looping from the nursery to the forests and back, reminds us that we are inextricably part of this process and that our work to maintain forests is ongoing.
BETULA PAPYRIFERA
Betula Papyrifera, paper birch, is native to the boreal forest, the earth’s largest land-based biome and store of carbon. A pioneer species, paper birch is one of the first to grow after disturbances such as fire where their seeds are carried by the wind. Yet, due to global warming, boreal forest climate zones are moving north much faster than the trees can migrate. Paper birch trees have relatively short life spans but decompose slowly on the forest floor. Long after the inner wood has been recycled by insects and fungi, their water-resistant bark skins remain as hollow horizontal forms, vestiges of a bygone climate.
Dana Fritz uses photography to investigate the ways we shape and represent the natural world in cultivated and constructed landscapes. She holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from Arizona State University.
Her honors include an Arizona Commission on the Arts Fellowship, a Rotary Foundation Group Study Exchange to Japan, and a Society for Photographic Education Imagemaker Award. Fritz’s work has been exhibited in over 140 venues including the Phoenix Art Museum, Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts, the Griffin Museum of Photography, and the Sheldon Museum of Art in the U.S. International venues include Museum Belvédère in The Netherlands, Château de Villandry in France, Xi’an Jiaotong University Art Museum in China, and Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Place M, and Nihonbashi Institute of Contemporary Arts in Japan.
Her prints are held in several collections including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Bryn Mawr College Special Collections, Pennsylvania; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art; and Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Fritz’s artist books are held in collections including Yale University’s Beinecke Library; the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s Hirsch Library; Special Collections, Archives, and Preservation at Colorado University Boulder; and Wellesley College’s Clapp Library.
Fritz has been awarded artist residencies at locations known for their significant cultural histories and gardens or unique landscapes including Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, California; Château de Rochefort-en-Terre in Brittany, France; Biosphere 2 in Oracle, Arizona; PLAYA in Summer Lake, Oregon; Cedar Point Biological Station in Ogallala, Nebraska; Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Saratoga, Wyoming; and Homestead National Historical Park in Nebraska.
Her work has been published in numerous exhibition catalogs including IN VIVO: the nature of nature, Encounters: Photography from the Sheldon Museum of Art, Grasslands/Separating Species, and Reclamation: Artist Books about the Environment, and was featured in print magazines Harper’s, Orion, Border Crossings, Studio, and Photography Quarterly. University of New Mexico Press published her monograph, Terraria Gigantica: The World under Glass, in 2017. Her second trade book, Field Guide to a Hybrid Landscape, was published by University of Nebraska Press in 2023. Fritz is currently Hixson-Lied Professor of Art in the School of Art, Art History & Design at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
ABBEY HEPNER | TROY, IL
The Light At The End Of History, 2021.
Photo Book, Paper over Board,
8 x 10 inches, 162 pages.
Edition of 500. $50.
The Light at the End of History: Reacting to Nuclear Impact presents photographs from artist Abbey Hepner’s decade-long examination of nuclear energy, the atomic bomb, and radioactive waste. By capturing distinct marks in time, Hepner makes visible the ongoing, often invisible, relationships with nuclear technologies.
Abbey Hepner is an artist and educator based outside of St. Louis Missouri. Hepner holds an M.F.A. in Photography from the University of New Mexico and undergraduate degrees in Art and Psychology from the University of Utah. She teaches at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville as an Assistant Professor of Art and Area Head of Photography.
Hepner’s artistic practice examines health, technology, and our relationship with place through photography, performance, video, and installation-based work. She frequently works at the intersection of art and science, investigating biopolitics and the use of health as a currency. Her work has been exhibited widely in such venues as the Mt. Rokko International Photography Festival (Kobe, Japan), SITE Santa Fe, the Krannert Art Museum, the University of Buffalo Art Galleries, Noorderlicht Photofestival (Groningen, Netherlands), the University of Notre Dame, and the Lianzhou Foto Festival (Lianzhou, China). Her work has been recently highlighted in Hyperallergic, Lenscratch, Ars Technica, Artillery Magazine, and Fraction Magazine. She has been an artist in residence at the Banff Center for Arts and Creativity in Canada, has presented at numerous Society for Photographic Education conferences, and was a 2020 Yuma Art Symposium presenter. Her monograph, The Light at the End of History, about nuclear issues was published by Daylight Books in 2021.
NANCY NICHOLS | BOSTON, MA
Pretty Sick, 2022.
Handmade Clamshell Box and
Handmade Books with Portfolio,
14 x 12 inches. Edition of 8. $5,000
Pretty Sick is a multi-faceted project that includes: 1) a hand-embossed clamshell box with four handmade books, 2) a dress made from hospital gowns, and 3) a portfolio of images that include several self-portraits in hospital gowns and images of the dress lined with material made from images of cancer cells.
These images deconstruct and reimagine the experience of illness—removing it from the confines of ill-lit hospital rooms and taking it to the garden using the simple imagery of flowers, leaves, and forests.
Pretty Sick is designed to challenge the common, knee-jerk narrative that cancer patients must battle heroically against their disease while the rest of us mindlessly race for the cure and we all blithely ignore the environmental causes of the disease. As long as the fault and the fear are hidden behind the veil of survivorship, the polluter can go on polluting, the politicians can pontificate, and the pharmaceutical companies can continue to cash in. In this way, my work touches on issues of identity and environmental justice as well as raising questions about who has the right to represent the cancer patient as an individual and survivors, in general, as a group.
An illness, after all, unless you happen to have it, is an idea. And ideas can be manipulated. Something we all learned as the endless debates and obfuscations about masks and vaccinations revealed what cancer patients have known all along; there is a fashion to illness.
Organizing these photos into a group has been about giving voice to the sometimes confusing, often inchoate experience of illness and loss. I crave both narrative coherence and closure. Art, for me, is a meaning making, memory changing machine.
Nancy A. Nichols is a photographer, writer, and editor. She holds an MFA in photography from New England College and has held editorial positions at The Harvard Business Review and The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour. Her current photographic work is focused on the intersection of illness and beauty. Drawing on her own experience of cancer and her experience caring for her son as he struggled with childhood leukemia, Nichols uses letter pressed text, microscopic images, hospital gowns, and images of invasive species to aestheticize and deconstruct the experience of illness. She is the author of Lake Effect: Two Sisters and a Town’s Toxic Legacy—a book on the environmental causes of illness. Her next book, a history of women and cars, will be published by Pegasus Books in March 2024.
AYSSA MINAHAN | BOSTON, MA
an end and a beginning, 2022.
Soft Cover Artist’s Book, Pur Perfect Binding with French Folding, Transparent Slipcase, 10.5 x 8 inches, 66 pages.
Edition of 100. $180
The photographic objects in "an end and a beginning" - chemigrams, gelatin silver prints, photograms, lumen prints and polaroids - oscillate between light and darkness, representational and abstract, and ephemeral and permanent. Links between disparate photographs are evidenced by stains and traces of chemistry, repeated imagery, and formal elements such as color and shape. I utilize these visual aesthetics to describe durational time, the layering of experiences, personal and collective loss, and the tension between image and object.
By creating images that will ultimately disappear or deteriorate into something else, I seek to challenge established notions of process, permanence and completion. What does it mean to make a photograph that is purposely fugitive? How can one utilize the materiality of the photographic medium to describe loss? Can the process by which the work is created become the work itself? Although the images do not directly address such questions, I view the work as a lyrical rendering of photography’s singular ability to visually depict essential truths about our lived experiences, evidenced by the creation of unique, non-reproducible objects imbued with marks and confirmation of their own existence.
Alyssa Minahan utilizes photographic materials, including unfixed gelatin silver paper and large format negatives, in non-traditional ways to express ideas integral to the medium of photography, specifically its complex relationship to time, space and memory. Minahan has released two publications with Datz Press, "an end and a beginning" (2022) and "NOTES" (2019). Her books are held in the collections of The New York Public Library, International Center for Photography Library, Amon Carter Museum of American Art Research Library and Harvard University Houghton Library, amongst others. Minahan has exhibited her work at numerous galleries and museums, including the Datz Museum of Art (Gwangju, South Korea), Center for Creative Photography (Tucson, Arizona), Pingyao International Photography Festival (Shanxi, China), Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, Massachusetts) and Boston University Art Galleries (Boston, Massachusetts). In 2021, she was awarded artist residencies at the Penumbra Foundation Workspace Program and Studios at MASS MoCA.