UnBound13! Artist Features: VI
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.
MATHILDE MUJANAYI | BALTIMORE, MD
Eve’s Adam, 2022.
Archival Pigment Print,
24 x 18 inches, Framed.
Edition #1 of 10
My practice centers around delving into my identity as a first-generation immigrant. Within this realm, countless intersections and narratives unfold. Over the years, my creative focus has revolved around recounting my journey of arriving here at the age of 9: the family and memories I left behind, the gradual distortion of my native languages as English asserted its dominance in my speech. I've delved into the dual immigrant experience, grappling with the realization of having two homes and the eventual choosing of where I truly belong. Now, I find myself drawn to crafting works that encapsulate the African Queer experience, a journey I'm actively living as I reconnect with my family from my country of origin.
Mathilde Mujanayi (she/her) is a Photography major from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Based on her identity as a black woman immigrant, Mujanayi utilizes any medium at hand for self exploration. Most of her works reside between the intimate and universal.
DOMINIQUE MUŃOZ | CHAPEL HILL, NC
Migration, 2024.
Archival Pigment Print (Mixed Media),
46 x 37 inches, Framed.
Edition #1 of 5 + 2AP.
The matriarchs of my family curated their homes in ways that I couldn't understand. Frames hung from odd heights, little shrines emanated a gentle glow, and green foliage flourished. The creative well of my influence begins here, in these domestic spaces.
My photographs are often set in environments reminiscent of my childhood, supercharged with imagination. I create surreal scenes using artificial lights and objects from my grandmother's home. I’m experimenting with esoteric, naturalistic rituals: the mysticism of my Mesoamerican ancestors. My work explores the themes of assimilation, family, and memory. As part of my practice, I deconstruct photographs, collaging them to build photographic objects. The textures in my work originate from childhood blankets, which obscure my portraits with armor. With backdrop stands and strobes, I photograph these textiles to conjure and honor the spirits of my Guatemalan matriarchs.
Political instability and armed conflict in Guatemala during the mid-20th century spurred significant waves of migration to the United States. My family was among those who embarked on this journey. As a third-generation Guatemalan American, I grapple with a disconnection from my ancestral roots. The Parakeet, a symbol in my piece Migration, references these migration patterns to the United States, evoking a sense of displacement caused by political figures in power. I mirror this migration with our environmental concerns as bird migration patterns change, impacting the growth of new life here on Mother Earth. The piece is an archival inkjet print with transparent parakeet images adhered to the print with magnets that cast a subtle green hue over areas of the print.
Dominique Muñoz is a Guatemalan-American visual artist whose photographs are grounded in environments reminiscent of his childhood memories, supercharged with imagination. In his current practice, he’s working with photographs, handmade books, printmaking, and found objects. His work explores themes of cultural assimilation, family, memory, and mysticism of his Mesoamerican ancestors. Dominique was the 1906 Group's inaugural Photographer-in-Residence shortly after graduating with his BFA in Photography & Film from VCUarts. He traveled around the country for over a year, documenting the art of building, highlighting the collectivism involved in construction. In 2017, Dominique was awarded his first solo exhibition at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., for his project, The Art of Building. He was recently awarded the 2024 Society of Photographic Educators Student in Innovative Imaging. His work has been part of several group exhibitions, including Soft Times Gallery (San Francisco, CA), Candela Books & Gallery (Richmond, VA), Silver Eye Center for Photography (Pittsburgh, PA), and The Curated Fridge (Somerville, MA).
JIM NEWBERRY| LOS ANGELES, CA
Untitled, 2023.
Archival Pigment Print,
20.5 x 18.75 inches, Framed.
Open Edition.
For the last few years I've been shooting a black and white series called "Secret Life of Plants." I'm interested in distilling the often busy visual structure of plants to a more minimal representation, and to reveal at least a hint of the transcendent in commonplace plants that are effectively invisible to us due to their ubiquity. My process involves using tight compositions to delineate textures, shape, and light in an revelatory way, and using color filtration to manipulate grayscale tones, to create a slightly otherworldly impression. I've also just recently begun to build my own wooden frames for the prints.
Jim Newberry grew up and began his photography career in Chicago, and now resides in Los Angeles. His photos have appeared in a multitude of books, magazines, and album covers, and his fine art photography has been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the U.S.
ALEX NYERGES | RICHMOND, VA
Jewish Cemetery, Marrakech, #5361, 3-5-23.
Archival Pigment Print,
17 x 22 inches, Framed.
Open Edition.
The beauty of photography, no matter the format or technique, is that it allows the photographer to capture a minute slice of time and space, Henri's Cartier Bresson's "decisive moment". It is a time and place that can never be replicated. Photography is the acting of 'seeing', not looking. As a photographer it is my goal to seize that moment when the light, shadows and the subject are just right, before, in a fleeting second, it disappears. Moreover, my quest is to capture a moment of beauty, transferring from the actual world to one of light and pixels and, finally, to a work of art on paper for all to enjoy.
Alex Nyerges is an internationally-award-winning photographer, curator, author, and photo historian who has exhibited across the United States, Australia, and Europe. His work is in collections in New York, Washington, D.C., Virginia, Ohio, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Palm Beach, Tampa, Richmond, Budapest, and elsewhere. His work has been exhibited in Atlanta, Budapest, Canberra, Houston, Richmond, Vienna, and Washington, D.C., among other places.
A native of Rochester, New York, the home of George Eastman and the Eastman Kodak Company, he grew up with a family tradition in photography and music. He has been creating photographs in 35 mm, medium and large formats for more than forty years and digitally since 2002. Seeking out the elements of beauty that surround us, so often unseen and neglected in the built and natural worlds, his work uses sunlight and its shadows to create works that are both modern and timeless. Enjoy.
MEJUNG PARK | SEOUL, KOREA
Still life for things that need a goodbye, Mourning, 2022.
Archival Pigment Print,
14 x 11 inches, Framed.
Edition #1 of 7.
Still life for things that need a goodbye, Mourning, 2022.
Archival Pigment Print,
14 x 11 inches, Framed.
Edition #1 of 7.
<Still life for things that need a goodbye, Mourning>
People live with numerous things throughout their lives. In the summer of 2018, I witnessed the finiteness of time in the by-products that resulted from a partial construction of our house, which we had shared for 11 years. Just as our human lives are finite, objects are also not eternal. This work began with beautiful mourning for the things that are easily consumed and discarded in our daily lives, which were once kept close to us as precious objects but are forgotten and disappear after their usefulness has run out.
I created a three-dimensional sculpture by bringing the form, texture, and color of used objects to a small stage. I composed them by cutting out two-dimensional paper flowers from a flower picture book that I had kept for a long time. Paper flowers were used to express them as a symbol (means) of mourning. Also, in Vanitas still life, flowers also symbolize death, and the irony is that the paper flowers stuffed in the book exist as flowers that do not wither or change forever. Although the delicately drawn paper flowers are not alive, we tried to give them visual interest by giving them the illusion of being alive for a moment through reproducing them with a camera.
Without reenacting any existing scenes, they encounter each other and become one composition like a fresh sensory experience freed from the elements of everyday life provided by the Dépaysment technique. With this,I bring them back onto the refined background and visualize them as an image of an untouchable plane. Additionally, the focus was on the overall harmony of the screen by using objects and background colors as aesthetic elements.
When I was a child, I used to play with paper dolls and imagine how I could dress them up by combining paper clothes that I had cut with scissors and how I could make them look pretty. Recalling the memories of that time, in this work, I wanted to touch and arrange the objects that had lost their purpose and the shapes of flowers transferred to non-living paper, decorate and mourn the soon-to-be-depleted objects beautifully, and leave them forever in a photograph. In this process, their senses, including the sense of touch, which reminded me of their entity, seemed to be further strengthened. Like Roland Barthes' play of presence and absence, which captures an object that existed in a photograph and makes it live forever in it, my act is to perform a photographic ritual and re-discover the value of old and obsolete objects as works of art. I wanted to try it and have it placed back with us forever as a beauty in a photo. Between before and after use, reality and representation, optical illusion and manifestation, my senses travel slowly.
Park Mejung majored in art education at Hanyang University's College of Education, and later completed the International Fashion Research Institute. She won the grand prize at the College Student Design Contest in Korea as a student. She later worked as a stylist for commercial commercials, fashion magazines, and broadcasts. She was a full-time fashion director at Ecole Charmant, Face Value, Juad B, Ipoh Makeup School, and gave lectures on fashion styles at several companies, including Samsung Life Insurance and Samsung C&T. She completed the Chung-Ang University Photography Academy.
JARED RAGLAND | LOGAN, UT/ BIRMINGHAM, AL
Tuscaloosa, Tuscaloosa County, Alabama…2020.
Archival Pigment Print,
21 x 24.5 inches, Framed.
Edition #1 of 5.
From Indigenous genocide to slavery and secession, and from the fight for civil rights to the championing of MAGA ideology, the national history written on, in, and by the people and landscapes of Alabama reveal problematic patterns at the nexus of our larger American identity. Photographed at a critical moment of pandemic and protest, economic uncertainty, and political polarization, What Has Been Will Be Again has led photographer Jared Ragland across more than 25,000 miles and into each of Alabama’s 67 counties to survey his home state’s cultural and physical landscape.
Social isolation is both a phrase and experience that has defined the recent past, and What Has Been Will Be Again expressly evokes the alienation that has characterized the moment. Yet the photographs bear witness to sites for which isolation and violence is nothing new—places where extracted labor and environmental exploitation have exacted heavy tolls over generations. Such isolation is less accidental or temporal, and more a product of decades of willful neglect by a mainstream America only now starting to visualize what—and who—has been pushed out of the collective frame of vision.
By traveling routes connected to brutal colonial legacies including the path of Hernando de Soto’s 1540 expedition, the Trail of Tears, the Old Federal Road, and the slave ship Clotilda, What Has Been Will Be Again contends with Alabama’s centuries-long past and present-day issues, and strategically focuses on the importance of place, the passage of time, and the visual-political dimensions of remembrance to confront White supremacist myths of American exceptionalism.
Jared Ragland is a fine art and documentary photographer and former White House photo editor. His collaborative, socially-conscious work critically confronts issues of identity, marginalization, and the history of place. He currently serves as Assistant Professor of Photography at Utah State University.
KRISTIAN THACKER | WEST VIRGINIA
Dreamland, 2024.
Archival Pigment Print,
17.5 x 21.5 inches, Framed.
Edition #1 of 5.
These images from the master's thesis "Anamnesis" present a glimpse of the duality of living in Appalachia and cherishing its picturesque environment; while being complicit in its ongoing destruction via industry and resource extraction. The goal of the work is to present a vision of the region that’s purpose extends beyond value judgments. Rather, it considers the manmade and natural environments of Appalachia holistically, each one integral to the experience and understanding of the other. Following the same aesthetic choices I make in my professional practice as a photojournalist for my artistic practice I blur the boundary between art and photojournalistic documentation. In this way, I adopt the visual language of the news media to reframe elements of the region that the media would otherwise ignore, obfuscate, or pass judgment on. In media clearcut narratives dictate the story to the reader, but here the content and sequence of the images and footage allows an ambiguity to come forward. This ambiguity invites the viewer to consider exactly what it is that they are seeing beyond the surface of the print itself.
Kristian Thacker is a photographer currently based in Barrackville, West Virginia. His work follows the legacy of centuries of natural resource extraction in central Appalachia. He received his BFA in Photography from Shepherd University in 2004 and will graduate with an MFA in Photography and Intermedia in the Spring of 2024. Select images from his masters thesis Anamnesis were selected for the American Photography 40 annual. His work has been featured in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, Vox Media, Barrons, Bloomberg Businessweek, BuzzFeed, NPR, TOPIC, and the Washington Post among others.
JASON REBLANDO | NORMAL, IL
Ifugao Belle, 2022.
Handmade Photocollage of Archival Pigment Prints,
24 x 20 inches, Framed.
Variant Edition, #3 of 10.
In an 1895 photograph from the University of Michigan Philippine archives, a smiling Filipina faces the camera, posing in front of lush tropical trees with a hand on her hip. The bottom half of her body is wrapped in an intricate tapestry, and the top half of her body is naked, except for beaded necklaces. Written into the photograph is the title “Young Ifugao Belle, 382.” This image is just one of thousands of photographs taken by American colonizers who were eager to create a narrative of white saviorism and thus shape the way Americans perceived the Philippines throughout the twentieth century.
I am a Filipino-American photographer and artist, and I have been creating mixed-media photocollages based upon archival images from the American colonial period in the Philippines for my project titled This Is Captured Paper. By physically cutting, pasting, and rearranging various elements of images upon images, I aim to deconstruct and critique the colonial gaze, while attempting to reclaim the photographic narrative. In some collages, the cut patterns reference textile-makers across the Philippine archipelago, while in other collages, shapes and silhouettes allude to a problematic colonial past.
This Is Captured Paper is a meditation upon the long, complex relationship between the Philippines and the United States. By weaving historical photographs into my own contemporary art practice, I recontextualize archives that codified colonial power dynamics between the United States and the Philippines. Ultimately, I hope that my project contributes to a growing conversation by contemporary artists who are eager to interrogate the colonizing power of the archive, not only for Filipinos, but for all people of the Global South.
Jason Reblando is an artist and photographer based in Normal, Illinois. He received his MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago, and a BA in Sociology from Boston College. He is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines, an Artist Fellowship Award from the Illinois Arts Council, and a Community Arts Assistance Program grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. His work has been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, Politico, Camera Austria, Slate, Bloomberg Businessweek, Marketplace, MAS Context, Real Simple, Places Journal, Chicago Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Reader. His photographs are collected in the Library of Congress, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Pennsylvania State University Special Collections, and the University of Louisville Special Collections. His monograph New Deal Utopias (Kehrer Verlag, 2017) focused on the Greenbelt Towns, three planned communities built by the federal government during the Great Depression. He is currently serving on the Society for Photographic Education Board of Directors (2022-2026) and is an Assistant Professor of Photography in the Wonsook Kim School of Art at Illinois State University.