UnBound13! Artist Features: II
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.
KATINA BITSICAS | COLUMBIA, MO
Glyphosate Dreams, 2023
C-Print,
43 x 33 inches, Framed.
Edition #1 of 5 + 2AP.
Glyphosate Dreams visually translates the deadly herbicide glyphosate into chemically deteriorated images, reflecting on its consequences to body and land, as I navigate the loss of family members. The broad-spectrum herbicide glyphosate, found in Roundup, is the most used herbicide in the world, known to cause cancer, with major implications for public health. However, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), came to different interpretations of the research, where the US EPA “concluded that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans”. This becomes a public health concern, when reality becomes secondary to the issue at hand to protect the company that utilizes this chemical and refuses any admission of guilt. This is apparent through the EPA email exchanges with Monsanto. I selected the most poignant parts of these email exchanges to include in a photographic project using glyphosate to physically deteriorate C-prints of these emails over time as they were buried in the ground. Additionally, I used images from my personal archive of my family’s land and farm that went through the same image treatment and process. The results of these prints varied from partially deteriorated, highlighting specific sections of the print, to completely disintegrated, leaving a behind a ghost-like image. These prints are then scanned and reprinted as large format C-prints, creating an archival interpretation of the imagery.
Katina Bitsicas is a Greek-American new media artist who utilizes video, installation, photography, AR and performance in her artworks to explore grief, loss, trauma and memory. She has exhibited worldwide, including The Armory Show, PULSE Art Fair, Satellite Art Fair, Superchief Gallery NFT, Plexus Projects, the Wheaton Biennial curated by Legacy Russell, CADAF: Digital Art Month Paris, Torrance Art Museum, Westbeth Gallery, New York, Eye’s Walk Festival, Syros, Greece, 57th Dimitria Festival, Thessaloniki, Greece, HereArt in New York, Art in Odd Places in Orlando, Digital Graffiti Festival, and the St. Louis International Film Festival. In 2022, her artist book Luci: The Girl with Four Hearts was published with Flower Press. She received her BA from Kalamazoo College, Post-Baccalaureate from SACI in Florence, Italy, and MFA from the University of South Florida. She is an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Digital Storytelling at the University of Missouri, where she also conducts research with the MU School of Medicine on utilizing digital storytelling as a meaning-making intervention for bereaved family members. This collaborative research has been published in Death Studies, OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying, and the Journal of Social Work in End-Of-Life & Palliative Care.
SHANE BOOTH | BENSON, NC
Grandpa Silas, 2023
Cyanotype on Muslin Prairie Dress,
72 x 36 inches.
Unique.
“In the Tall Grass” is a series of works consisting of cyanotypes on prairie dresses and bonnets. These dresses and bonnets, with their historical and cultural significance serve as a canvas to explore themes of family history and dynamics, as well as American history. I choose the prairie dress, which is a symbol of rural life, to pay homage to the strong women in my family who settled the plains of Nebraska. By cyanotyping images onto these dresses, I am wanting to create a dialogue between the past and the present. The images I choose range from vintage photographs to the personal property of ancestors. Each one brings new meaning to the dresses and the ways we understand our histories. They explore themes of masculinity, family trauma, and cultural identities. I choose these themes to resonate with the dress and its history hoping to evoke conversations about America and its troubled past.
Shane Booth grew up in central Nebraska where he would spend hours looking at family photos with this grandmother, sparking his love for photography. He graduated with a BA in art from Nebraska Wesleyan University and an MFA in photography from the Savanna College of Art and Design. Currently he is a Full Professor of photography at Fayetteville State University. His diverse body of work has taken him all over the world where he has taught workshops and exhibited work in Sweden, Africa, Taiwan, and most recently Russia. He received a grant to work with HIV positive orphans in Ethiopia with Artists for Charity, and was awarded a another grant by the US Embassy in Moscow to work with the LGBTQ and HIV positive people in Russia. He has many honors including being nominated for Sweden’s favorite TV star by QX magazine for his stint on the wildly popular reality tv show Allt for Sverige, tackling the subject of being HIV positive. It was his time on this show that took him back to his roots and he beganphotographing Nebraska and its people. He also photographed Laura Bush for The National Willa Cather Foundation. His camera of choice is an antique studio camera from 1867 which he found in a junk shop in Alma NE that he has converted to shoot 8x10 film. He has recently began making cyanotype prairie dresses and bonnets.
MELISSA BORMAN | MINNEAPOLIS, MN
My Father Was a Flower Garden, 2023
Lenticular Print,
32.75 x 24 inches,
Framed. Edition #1 of 3 + 1 AP.
My Father Was a Flower Garden is an element from an experiential, multi-media installation and corresponding artist book titled [Re]collections & Earthly Artifacts. Using images, objects, text, and video the work addresses the interconnected relationship embedded in using landscape elements as metaphors to depict human stories and how these depictions shape our ideas of our surroundings.
Many elements of the installation are inspired by my upbringing in a peripatetic military family and my drive to share stories my parents were denied opportunities to tell. My father was a closeted gay man in the military and my mother struggled with mental and physical illness for much of her life. I grew accustomed to the need to acclimate myselfto new places through repeated cross-country relocations along with ever-changing family dynamics.
In addition to introducing new works, [Re]collections & Earthly Artifacts revisits previously overlooked objects, images, and ideas from abandoned and unfinished projects spanning two decades of my practice. Drawing inspiration from film, poetry, literature, and the natural world, the installation consists of deeply personal and vulnerable expressions of memory, grief, loss, and resilience.
Melissa Borman is a Minneapolis-based photographer, installation artist, and curator. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including Regional Cultural Center, Co. Donegal, Ireland, Galería Valid Foto, Barcelona, Spain, Museum of Arts and Sciences, Macon, GA, Filter Space, Chicago, IL, and Griffin Museum, Boston, MA.
Melissa is a recipient of the Minnesota State Arts Board, Artist Initiative and Creative Support Grants, Metropolitan Regional Arts Council Grant, and Rochester Art Center’s Jerome Emerging Artist Award. Melissa has published three artist books. Two of them, “Birds” and “[Re]collections & Earthly Artifacts,” are in the Rosemary Furtak Artist Book Collection at the Walker Art Center.
Melissa has been an educator for over 20 years. For 15 years, she led summer programs at the Burren College of Art in Co. Clare, Ireland. Recently, she has served as a mentor in Minneapolis College of Art and Design's MFA Program. Melissa is currently a full-time faculty member in Art and Gender Studies and Exhibitions Director at Century College in White Bear Lake, MN
KATE BREAKEY | TUCSON, AZ
Leopard Moth, from Squadron, Seven Moths, 2024
Archival Pigment Print on Rag Paper, Hand-Colored with Pastel and Pencil,
33 x 27 inches,
Framed. Variant Edition of 10.
I am awestruck by the natural world, fascinated by the strange beauty and diversity of living things and the marvelous ways they have evolved to survive. Evolution is staggeringly inventive: octopus and chameleon can change the color of their skin to hide. Other creatures are patterned—spotted or striped, to be hard to see—or have bold markings to advertise to predators they are poisonous or venomous. But few creatures can evolve to adapt fast enough to survive what is currently happening to this planet, and so we are entering a phase called the Sixth Mass Extinction, or the Anthropocene extinction. Every day 72 species become extinct, approximately three per hour. Gone forever.
Populations of bats, birds, bees, butterflies and moths are in sharp decline worldwide because of the ubiquitous use of pesticides, habitat destruction and climate change. Since all these little creatures are pollinators, without them, plants and many crops can’t propagate. The severe long-term consequences of this to sustainable food production will affect human health and survival. We have failed to understand and respect that we are part of something larger, and this will doom us also.
I made larger-than-life images of fragile little creatures out of my own sense of wonder and hope. To pay attention to all the beautiful details—to lovingly render their scales or feathers is my way to care, to find redemption in an uncaring world.
Kate Breakey is internationally known for her large-scale, richly hand-colored photographs including her acclaimed series of luminous portraits of birds, flowers and animals in a series called Small Deaths published in 2001 by University of Texas Press. Her other monographs include, Painted Light, University of Texas in 2010, a career retrospective that encompasses a quarter century of prolific image making.
Her collection of photograms, entitled 'Las Sombras / The Shadows' was published by University of Texas Press in October 2012. This series is a continuation of her lifetime investigation of the natural world which in her own words is ‘brimming with fantastic mysterious beautiful things’. Since 1980 her work has appeared in more than 120 one-person exhibitions and in over 60 group exhibitions.
A native of South Australia, Breakey moved to Austin, Texas in 1988. She completed a Master of Fine Art degree at the University of Texas in 1991 where she also taught photography in the Department of Art and Art History until 1997. Her collections include the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, The Australian National Gallery, The Wittliff collections, and the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts, as well as various private collections.
She has resided in Tucson, Arizona for 23 years. She regularly teaches workshops nationally and internationally.
TOMMY BRUCE | PORTLAND, OR
Shaving Ube, 2024
Archival Pigment Print,
16 x 24 inches, Framed. Edition #1 of 5 + 2AP.
Untitled (11/09/2022 10:38:18PM), 2022
Archival Pigment Print,
12 x 20 inches, Framed.
Edition #1 of 5 +2AP.
Shavine Ube shows Ube, a sheep, posing demurely for the camera while he has his wool shorn from his belly. This image is meant to eroticize and dramatize the everyday associations we have with different animals and to explore new arrangements and subjects for contemporary photographic portraiture.
The second image come from an ongoing series "Wild Night", wherein I make photographs of furries on an infrared camera in both natural and urban environments at night. The series is an ode to Kohei Yoshiyuki's "The Park" series, and a playful twist on game cam images of animals in the night.
Tommy Bruce’s work explores the formation of identity in contemporary culture through work with the Furry community. He lives in Portland, Oregon and was born in State College, Pennsylvania. He received a MFA in Studio Art from the University of New Mexico in 2020 and a BFA in Photography with a minor in Creative Writing from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2014. He is the secretary for the Pride Caucus of the Society for Photographic Educators. His work has been featured in exhibitions and publications internationally, including Art in America, The Institute for Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Vice, Lenscratch, and ArtForum. He has advocated for the legitimacy and value of the Furry community through public presentations, exhibitions, and programming for more than a decade. He was named one of “12 New Mexico Artists to Know” by Southwest Contemporary Magazine in 2021. His two-person exhibition with Mark Zubrovich, “Wild Desire,” opened at Sanitary Tortilla Factory in July 2023.
DEBMALYA RAY CHOUDHURI | NEW YORK, NY
Memories, 2022
Archival Pigment Print,
8 x 12 inches, Mounted.
Edition #1 of 3 +2AP.
The Weight of the Earth is an autobiographical diary of fragility, loss, and desire. This long-term work is the artist’s response/reaction to the suicide of a lover, the author’s confrontation with tuberculosis as a young adult, and their understanding of queer identity in the current socio-political climate as a brown South Asian immigrant in the politically and socially fragmented landscape of America. This work also expands the conversation on the author’s current socioeconomic relationship with a foreign land, its connection to the people encountered, and their collective trauma, desires, and fears, in the hope of finding a reconciliation.
It is conceived as a trilogy. The death of a lover became a point of departure that provoked Deb to create a diary of encounters laid out in a multilayered narrative often documenting the growth and transition of the same people over time. It also encompasses the author’s experience of coming out as queer at a later stage in life, the guilt and the shame associated with living a dual life, the subsequent overcoming of that, and how people express grief and desire through the image and performance. Adopted from the name of the audio journals by the author’s inspiration, gay artist, and activist, David Wojnarowicz who died at the age of 37 due to AIDS, The Weight of The Earth grapples with the often-complicated link between mourning and melancholia, while also raising the question of what being queer means in today’s world.
The author weaves a tapestry of situations, and a healing space for those they met, often survivors of personal trauma and violence, through layers and fabric, amplifying a certain sense of anonymity and ambiguity in the work. In this process, they weave together different personal narratives that acknowledge and simultaneously interrogate the Western canons of photography, philosophy, and semiotics.
This ongoing inquiry is not only a personal experience but also a comment on the universal human condition, in the author’s own words- how we exist in this “economy of desire”. Influenced by the idea of a rhizome, this diary constitutes a multiplicity of situations and encounters. These encounters attempt to expand the often-neglected conversations on taboo issues surrounding mental health & suicide, traumas related to trans & queer experience & human feelings of desire & longing.
The Weight of the Earth constitutes the author’s self-portraits alongside portraits of strangers and friends who they met along the way and how through this exchange, they continue to build a greater image of the self. This is a way to develop a fleeting community of people, far from the artist’s homeland- an anthropological game of the artist’s own life.
By adopting the form of a collaborative choreography/collaboration in which the authentic is sometimes colored with a dream, the author ultimately raises the question of self-affirmation and creates a community and healing space in their “imagined homeland”.
Debmalya Ray Choudhuri (b. Kolkata,1991) (him/them) is an artist from India, currently based in New York.
Their diverse practice, rooted in the form of a diary, engages photography, performance, and text. They talk about confronting personal trauma and mental health situations while addressing contemporary societal questions on the “queerness” of identity, body, and space. Taking the personal tragic experience of confronting the suicide of a lover & the taboo associated with suicide, addiction, and mental illness, as a point of questioning the human condition, their form has evolved from its roots in the need to take distance from the chaos of the surroundings and get intimate, physically, and emotionally- in places where the hunt is more lyrical, delicate, and intense. Over time, this has naturally flowed from finding a sense of belonging in one place to connecting to people by establishing proximity to one person at a time. This way, the author tries to understand how people express desire and love and uses these experiences with strangers and friends to question the complex notion of being queer in today’s broader sociopolitical realm of existence. This approach adopted by the author aims to provoke the uncomfortable questions of identity & representation, the nature of the human condition, and the specifics of image reproduction and consumption, often latent in the cultural blind spots under late-stage capitalism. The lines between the subject and the photographer are fluid in the work. These dual conversations open new perspectives on the relationship between the self and the other.
Deb continues to show work nationally and internationally. Their recent shows include Rotterdam Photo Festival, Les Rencontres des Arles, France, The LGBT Center & Enfoco NYC, TILT Institute, Philadelphia among others. They have published works on The Elephant Magazine, The British Journal of Photography, Der-Greif, Humble Arts Foundation, ASAP Connect, Alkazi Foundation India, among others. Their works are in several private collections around the world in Paris, New York, New Delhi, and Berlin.
KAITLYN DANIELSON | NEW YORK
Shelter, 2020
Found Photographs on Handmade Paper,
20 x 15 inches Framed.
Unique.
No Man's Land, 2023
Found Photographs on Paper,
14 x 18 inches,
Framed. Unique.
I am a collector of old photographs. Drawn to their delicate yet enduring physicality, I marvel at these perfect illustrations of time’s passage and find endless beauty in their decay.
Removed from their once-beloved, now obsolete photo albums, the snapshots are turned over and I am confronted with the direct mark of a human hand. These uncovered gestural marks resemble a unique calligraphy similar to abstract painting. By way of erratic composition, disparate photos find their way together, the abstraction of the ripped paper, glue stains and chemical residue speak their own language.
Obsessively arranging the shapes, textures and colors, I create balance, find order, and discover a place to direct fear of my own decay. The act is a meditative visualization of personal memory. Reminiscent of Rorschach tests, my subconscious reveals itself as the artworks take form. What remains is evidence of my memories, still moments of time, images of thought.
Kaitlyn Danielson is an artist based in the Catskill mountains of New York. She holds a BFA in Photography & Video from the School of Visual Arts where she received the Rhodes Family Award for Outstanding Students and the SVA Alumni Scholarship Award. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and featured in PDN magazine, Musee' Magazine, Brutjournal, and Lenscratch.
Kaitlyn’s practice is rooted in historic photographic processes where she relies on the fundamental ingredients of silver and light to produce an image. The sensitive and sometimes unpredictable nature of these processes mirrors the vulnerability of life that she grapples with in her work. Finding solace in visualizing life’s ephemerality, her photographs become a tangible, permanent record of her encounter with mortality.