UnBound13! Artist Features: I
UNBOUND13!
July 5 – August 3
Join us for a breakdown of our annual juried + invitational photography exhibition. Throughout the exhibition, we’ll share information about our artists and the processes behind their featured pieces.
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 the permanent collection of a notable arts institution.
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. No matter what, your funds support an UnBound13! artist.
GABRIEL ALLEN | TUSCALOOSA, AL
Untitled_COWBOYS, 2023
Archival Pigment Print,
30 x 24 inches, Framed.
Edition #1 of 3.
The included series takes its starting point from Richard Prince’s “Cowboy” series. Gabriel Allen has curated, cut out and assembled roughly 100 figures from advertising found in various magazines from the 1980s. The series poses questions about the future of digital media and imaging in a culture increasingly saturated with advertising while inspiring conversation about the history of the analog medium using collage techniques, lighting, and meticulous still-life compositions.
Allen brings his selected analog print imagery into a digital format and uses photo editing software to manipulate the color and scale. Allen constructs a unique cardboard structure for each cutout image so that each one may stand alone and function as a standalone, movable "actor." After that, he repositions and illuminates his cutout figures, makes new photographs of them, and prints the images at a size that exceeds the original copies, providing scale-shifts that speak to the fundamental structures of photography. Through multiple transitions between analog and digital mediums, the resulting photographs create dynamic visual relationships and compositions that read as pages from the same magazine.
Gabriel Allen was born in Savannah, GA in 2001 and raised in San Antonio, TX. He is currently completing a BFA in graphic design from the University of Alabama, and plans on attending an MFA program in photography in Fall of 2024. His studio practice utilizes an interdisciplinary framework to examine the intersections between media overstimulation, consumerism, authorship, and illusion. He works with appropriated materials from print, broadcast, and internet media as a form of inquiry into the evolution of communication and market-driven consumption.
AIDAN AVERY | TUCSON, AZ
Cowgirl (Gold), 2024
Gelatin Silver Print,
4 x 3.25 inches;
11.5 x 9.5 inches, Framed.
Edition #2 of 3.
Saguaro (Gold), 2023
Gelatin Silver Print,
3.25 x 4 inches;
11.5 x 9.5 inches, Framed.
Edition #3 of 5.
The “Mythologies” gold prints explore archetypal imagery from the Southwest. In this project, I am trying to encounter and understand mythologized imagery, traditions, and objects from the Sonoran Desert. I am also asking, what role, if any, remains for them in modern life. I created these works using darkroom processes, expired Polaroid film, as well as a rare, discontinued gelatin silver paper with a golden base. Working with “obsolete” materials and getting to know my surrounding desert both require hands-on relationships with the past. In the desert, I’m learning about a revered landscape’s history through physical exploration. In the darkroom, with the golden paper, I’m exploring what sorts of meaningful artistic creations remain possible with a forgotten, historical medium. In both cases, I’m prospecting for, and reencountering, certain archetypes and mythologies of the Southwest.
Aidan Avery is a photographer based in Tucson, Arizona. He received an MFA from the University of Arizona in 2023 and a BA from Seattle University in 2018. Aidan works with creative applications of “obsolete” mediums — namely, discontinued films, papers, and Polaroids. His photographic work involves hands-on processes, including camera construction, Polaroid processes, traditional darkroom printing, and experimental darkroom methods.
Aidan also works at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. He has exhibited work in galleries across the United States and has received several awards and grants, including the Big Sky Film Grant.
ISABELLE BALDWIN & ZOE ELEFTERIN | TUCSON, AZ
Dual Self Portrait,
Sleeping in Arizona, 2021
Analog C-Print, 11 x 14 inches
Edition #1 of 5.
Isabelle Baldwin and Zoe Elefterin met while attending Pratt Institute where they were deeply immersed in darkroom and studio practices and later received their BFAs in Photography in 2018. With a clear understanding of the foundation of one another’s work, Baldwin and Elefterin have been major proponents in supporting the evolution of each other’s individual artistic voices. Over their decade-long friendship, they have watched each other grow from students to professionals, and have been intimately involved with each other’s coming of age as artists. In 2021, they started their project, ‘Reimagining the American Road Trip’, partnering with prestigious brands like Kodak Professional, Robert’s Camera, Hasselblad, and Moment. They have since continued documenting each other on various road trips across the United States, covering over two dozen states and national parks.
Isabelle Baldwin is a photographer and writer based in Tucson, Arizona. She received her BFA in Photography with a minor in Sustainability from Pratt Institute in 2018. Her passions for environmentalism and the female experience are central to her work. Originally from western North Carolina, her creative practice is shaped by the people and places that she calls home. From the Appalachian Mountains to the Sonoran Desert and the open road, her work is inspired by the organic materials and shapes of the American South and Southwest. Her project, “Sleepy Time Down South” was exhibited in the Pratt Institute Photography Gallery and has been featured on Aint-Bad Magazine, Oxford American, Velvet Eyes, Booooooom, and The Photographic Journal. Her work has also been published in the New York Times, Rachel Ray Magazine, Alexandria Living Magazine, and featured in the 2017 Whitney Houston Biennial.
Born in Canton, Ohio in 1995 Zoe Elefterin holds a BFA in Photography (2018) from Pratt Institute. She is currently a working commercial and fine-art photographer. Her personal work uses photography as a foundation to construct narratives that explore the nature of a body translated and reimagined as an image. Elefterin uses both found and commercial imagery in conjunction with self-portraits to explore the attributes of her own image. Through this practice of self-documentation paired with analog and digital photo manipulation, she attempts to create commentary about the politics of beauty, advertising, and gender performance. Elefterin is also 1⁄2 of an art collective called The Sisters Elefterin that she founded in 2018 with her sibling, Ari Elefterin. They create work that explores their mutual interest in the evolution and politics of the human body. While their practice is performative in nature, it often pulls from their training in photography, dance, theater, advertising, and industrial design. Their work is both physically and conceptually layered; sometimes in the form of thousands of pieces of printed images covering a space, or as an analysis of the nuanced, emotional qualities of skin. Elefterin had her first solo show at Pratt Institute in 2018 and has since participated in multiple group shows in New York, including two self-curated shows with The Sisters Elefterin. She hasspoken to students as a guest lecturer at Parsons and at Pratt Institute as a guest critic, and has had her photographs featured in Vogue Mexico, L’Officiel Magazine, and V Magazine.
RACHAEL BANKS | NEWPORT,KY
Bummer Lamb, 2022
Archival Pigment Print,
12 x 9 inches, Framed.
Edition #3 of 5.
"The Trail of the Dead" is a visual anthology of life and death within the central region of Kentucky. Photographic imagery presents the intertwined storylines of my family and whitetail deer with shared experiences of trauma and the landscape we understand as home. For ten years, I have produced photographs of my immediate and assumed family within the Knobs and Bluegrass regions of Central Kentucky. My family's beef cattle farm in Bagdad, KY, serves as a rural base of refuge that is central to where I make most of my photographs. Depictions of rural Kentucky frequently present a region where people are seemingly stuck or looking for an escape, while my work offers an alternate perspective. I am interested in the dysfunction within my family that is the foundation of my identity and challenges the presentation of people and places as a generalized label.
My compulsive documentation stems from generational trauma that informs my interest in the familial unit and the relationship we have with the place we call home. I have experienced life without family or connection to home, and my photographs commemorate and preserve what I understand to be irreplaceable and hope never to lose again.
I grapple with the anxiety that we become more like our parents as we age - whether we are better or worse versions or carbon copies. Despite my resistance to the idea of a pre-determined fate, I have an attraction to people who possess the attributes I wish to hide or avoid. The subject of mortality is no stranger to me or my community. Ghosts of the past that haunt us into adulthood are the binding glue in my relationships with others.
While my family and where I am from are complicated, there is a simple need for understanding over judgment. My experience in photographing the lives of others and the place known as home has taught me the value of resilience, being present, and never looking the other way.
Rachael Banks [with an ae like Michael] is a working artist and Associate Professor of Photography at Northern Kentucky University. Her research interests include folklore, ecology, and epigenetics. Rachael's work addresses trauma and nature as central to relationships and experiences with the individual, the family unit, and its lasting effect on communities. She compulsively photographs deer and black dogs.
MORGAN BARRIE | MENOMONIE, WI
Captivity II, 2017
Archival Inkjet Print, Digital Collage,
50 x 40 inches, Framed.
Edition #2 of 3.
A landscape can be read like a text, each element revealing a piece of a narrative. Weeds can tell stories of traveling across continents and displacing other species to dominate their new terrains. Cultivated plants have survived and spread partially through their seduction of human beings, and some animal species are now believed to have partially domesticated themselves. Landscape is something constructed, piece by piece, by many different players.
Myth of the Flat World explores this built aspect of the environment by following the same basic structure as millefleur tapestries. Each work is assembled flower by flower so that the final image contains dozens of individual photographs. Native species mix with non-native and even invasive plants, as do human and animal elements.
Morgan Barrie is an artist and photographer based in the Midwest. She studied at Columbia College Chicago, where she received her BA, and Eastern Michigan University, where she received an MFA in Photography in April 2013. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She currently works from a studio in Menomonie, Wisconsin and is an Assistant Professor in the School of Art & Design at the University of Wisconsin-Stout.
DANA BELL | BROOKLYN, NY
From Binoculars: Man Tests Swift Instruments 10x24 Armored Egret Binoculars, 2024.
Chromogenic Print on DPII Paper and Dye Sublimation Print on Aluminum. Two Framed Prints, 19.25 x 21.5 inches (total). Unique.
My work explores an encyclopedic array of human activity and gesture through photography and pictures that guide my image making. I recreate the imagery of vernacular photographs sourced from eBay (mostly in screenshot form, but a few purchased) that document body language, with a focus on hands as a means of expression. I remove the figures’ faces, opening up narrative possibilities and inviting viewers to question the means by which stories are told. I erase the backgrounds to clarify the significance of the figures' gestures, leaving only a stark backdrop, a palimpsest and a negative space that becomes another character, a beckoning between presence and absence. My works are also inspired by single-panel cartoons. Yet while most cartoons require a caption to complete their meaning, I have typically chosen to eliminate the caption, creating another opportunity for viewers to infer their own narratives. This is my first proposal to include both tile and source material alongside my works.
The color relationships also add significance: the cooler and warmer tones offer play between the action, mood, and time of day, and are a nod to color-field painting. The stark contrasts between hues suggest a filter between the original photograph and the resulting artwork. In my embossed one-color prints, another type of filter is suggested, like one you might find in a dream state, manifested as a raised outline with recessed bodies which might also be read as surface disruption.
The surface of my works disguise the artist’s hand, commenting on the ephemeral nature of digital image production and the reproducibility of the image. The images I choose have vantage-points that describe recognizable gestures and body language that relate to contemporary socio-political issues like climate change, patriarchy, and post-colonialism. For instance, in my recent series on tourists, the destructive attributes of post-colonialism are at the forefront. These works often show binoculars pointing at popular sights. The tourists’ presence and gaze disrupts the lives of the locals. The emptiness around the figures suggests that post-colonial ecological and social damage has left behind innumerable scars. The story told by the painting of a photograph neutralizes photography’s documentary claims. If the photograph is a document, as described by Ramana Javitz, the Curator of the Picture Collection from 1924-1968, my work flattens the document in a cartoon-like manner, placing these images in a more accessible and universal context.
For this series “From Hello,” I am using the NYPL Picture Collection’s folders as research material. Since eBay’s beginning in the late nineties, I have searched for figurative material and signal-related poses to use as a basis for my artwork. As my research has evolved, I have found that the naming of photographs (often of unknown origin) are frequently categorized with insensitive terms that devalue and belittle the images. Breaking with my past practice of avoiding captioning, the artworks that result from this project will be titled with captions found in the archives of the Picture Collection that call attention to the language used to describe their source material. I have taken these results from these archival sources and recreated them into drawings using Adobe Illustrator, and then photographs that will be hung together alongside prints of their source material. The archival material will be placed alongside the artworks as well as the text from which the title was drawn.
Dana Bell was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1974. She received her BFA from Wayne State University and MFA from Maine College of Art in 2004. Her works span from choreography to mixed media collage, to painting, printmaking and handmade paper, including her most recent inclusion of archival materials, which double as her source material. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and was awarded the 2013 NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) fellowship in Choreography, Gregory Millard Fellow, the 2012 Change, Inc award, and NYC Artist's Fellowship. She recently was awarded a residency at the Pace House in Stonington, Maine, ans a Maker residency at Fat Cat Fab Lab in addition to a Manhattan Graphics Center scholarship, and is a 2023 Print Club of New York honoree.
JILL BEMIS | BOSTON, MA
My Childhood Rock Collection (Doane Rock), 2023.
Gelatin Silver Print,
11 x 14 inches,
Framed. Unique.
This work is my means of exploring human impermanence and landscape, as well as their intersections with the photographic process. Through the lenses of geologic rock, human experience, and the photographic object, this work tries to examine the persistent and often painful march of time, its pace and effects felt disparately by each.
This work began as I looked to glacial boulders for a sense of permanency in a time of societal turmoil during and following the pandemic. I had been overcome by the sense of lost time and life as I was also being greeted uncomfortably by my thirties. A stone's experience of time is seemingly slower and more certain instead of the ever quickening and chaotic human temporal experience. As I work with the rock collections of those close to me, they act as a bridge between geological and human timelines.
In the darkroom I focus on experimental printing methods, such as combining traditional printing and photograms. I started intentionally printing on expired silver gelatin paper that was gifted to me and then sat unused for more than a decade. This has been a process of combining my own artistic choices with the effects that time has had on my materials.
Jill Bemis is an interdisciplinary artist with roots in analog photography. Growing up along the coastal marshland of Massachusetts has had perhaps the biggest impact on her art-making practice; the tide gifted Jill an example of slowness, rhythm, and mystery. Jill received an MFA from Lesley University where she was awarded a grant from the Photographic Resource Center (PRC), and a teaching fellowship. She currently is an adjunct professor of Art in the Boston area.
SHWETA BIST | NEW YORK, NY
Cooking (Sh!t I Do), 2024
Archival Pigment Print,
20.5 x 30.5 inches, Framed.
Edition #1 of 6 + 2AP.
Every day, mothers do wide-ranging physical, mental, and emotional work– programming the present and future for their children while constantly responding to the environment where they are raising a family. Sara Ruddick called this Maternal Thinking.* She proposed that mothering delivers profound socio-political and economic significance and deserves critical evaluation.
Inspired by Ruddick’s philosophy and using myself as a subject in the series, Sh!t I Do, I composite digital photographs to create domestic scenes depicting a mother engaged in chores. She performs mundane tasks, often multitasking or juggling personal work with care work, fulfilling her family's needs while socializing her daughters in response to the current socio-political milieu. She meets the viewer's gaze, insisting on acknowledgment of her labor and its value. For her, the domestic sphere is a site for resistance.
Some objects in these household scenes are necessary evils of our modern lifestyles, while others allude to a bi-cultural home. I use symbolism to suggest ideas or attributes. Flowers bloom over young girls who are coming of age as their mother tends to their evolving needs. Outfits created with Indian Rupees and embellished with digitally drawn lace are intended to give the impression of a comfortable (royal) life. But, although it may seem to an onlooker that all is well, the situation may warrant deeper consideration. The currency used is, in fact, demonetized.** Its lack of value is meant to seem absurd and lead the viewer to contemplate the value of motherwork, or further, that non-recognition of such labor can lead to a devaluation of one’s self-worth.
Feminist progress got us to the point of more or less equal pay, but today pay inequality is largely on account of a motherhood gap because the brunt of care work still falls primarily on mothers. In a society where power is synonymous with capital, care work is relegated to invisibility, often adversely affecting their financial, mental, and physical health. This project aims to assert that these issues need attention and hopes to encourage dialogue about mothering as thoughtful, value-generating work that responds to and contributes to society.
* Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, 1989
Shweta Bist (b. 1980) is a lens-based artist born in New Delhi, India and currently working and living in New York. Inspired by personal narratives, her photographic work is an exploration of maternal subjectivity. She is a postgraduate in commerce from Delhi University, India, and an alumna of the School of Visual Arts Continuing Education, New York.
With an interest in psychology and philosophy, Shweta uses metaphors of color, poetry, and symbolisms from nature and art history to explore identity, memories, perception, and emotions from a maternal and feminist perspective.
In addition to exhibitions in the United States, Canada, and the UK, Shweta has made presentations at academic and art conferences on Mother Studies in the US and UK. She is an artist mentor with Spilt Milk Gallery, Edinburgh, and is a co-founder of Mother Creatrix Collective, a New York- based collective that supports the work of artist-mothers by creating exhibition opportunities for its members.