UnBound13! Artist Features: VII
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.
JESSE RIESER | LOS ANGELES, CA/PHOENIX, AZ
American Hypnosis, 2023.
Archival Pigment Print,
32 x 42 inches, Framed.
Edition #1 of 5 + 2AP.
This is the transmission of a citizen who seems comfortable sitting with the knowledge that he is as intrigued by his home as he is alarmed by it. These photographs are as much about the American roadside as they are about the infinitely flat and delusional digital landscape, a place where reverence is arbitrarily distributed between the meaningful and meaningless components of our world, both existing and extinct. If Christmas in America is a thematic and visual exercise in American Maximalism, these images are deceptively nuanced photographs of—and for—an America that has done everything it can to abolish nuance, creating bleached-out stand-ins for the place itself. It’s hard to ignore the current collective fear of losing one’s version of America—one's way of life—and the fear that it, too, is fleeting. It’s as if the concept of America is unshareable. Here, you will find surreal postcards from a fever dream—a feeling of familiar uneasiness, as if something is missing or has been plucked out of the frame. Erased.
As this project nears completion, I have realized these works are less of a social commentary on those navigating their fears and ultimately a projection of my own.
Fear of aging and the chapter of my youth fully closed as the passage of time accelerates.
Fear of new technology and my own obsolescence.
Fear of our distressed natural world.
Fear of continual instability, both financially and politically.
Fear of losing the life I have built, constantly recalculating expectations and promises.
Maybe it is my America that is vanishing.
Jesse was born in the Ozarks--an 80’s kid with a Midwestern upbringing in Springfield, Missouri. At Arizona State University he majored in photography and art history while attending the Herberger Institute of Art and Design. Now working out of Phoenix and Los Angles, he continues his exploration of uniquely American themes paired with his unique use of light and color.
Jesse has been interviewed and featured in The New York Times, Time, National Geographic, Architectural Digest, NPR, Buzzfeed, Wired, Fast Company, and the Washington Post.
His work has been celebrated by Photolucida’s Critical Mass Top 50 in 2011, 2013, and 2018, Communication Arts Photography Annual (2x), PDN Photo Annual (6x), American Photography Annual (17x) and a recipient of the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward award (Top Emerging Fine Art Photographer in North America and U.K. Under 35)
With over 40 exhibitions, selected solo shows at the Mountain Shadows Gallery, (Arizona) Mabee Gerrer Museum of Art (Oklahoma) Smithsonian affiliated Irvine Center for the Arts (Texas), and Newspace Center for Photography (Oregon).
He has been commissioned by Apple, Adidas, Adobe, AT&T, Amtrak, Coca-Cola, Disney, The Ford Motor Company, NBA, NFL, United Airlines, Warner Brothers, Wieden+Kennedy, and Visa. He regularly contributes to The New York Times, Time, Wired, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal and ESPN.
As a past winner, he has twice been a judge and panelist for The One Club Young Guns program- identifying the top 30 creatives under 30 working around the world.
GREGG SEGAL | LOS ANGELES, CA
Hotel Without a Pool, 2023.
Archival Pigment Print,
28 x 40 inches, Framed.
Edition #1 of 10.
Last year, when my brother went off the rails, lost his New York apartment, and wound-up living on the streets, I poured over old family photos, as if I might find signs of his mental illness. I found I had trouble separating Mark’s life from my own. Our lives were rooted in the same stories going back generations. Steppingstones led to our mother’s estranged father who disappeared when she was six, and who bears a striking resemblance to my brother.
But the old family photos didn’t convey what I’d hoped they might. Few pictures illustrated the stories I recalled from childhood and the lore that had been passed down. I began creating new images, cobbling old photographs together and sketching in the missing pieces, conjuring, shaping, and distilling the past. The pictures, which fall somewhere between photography and painting, imagine what was and what might have been. They distill traits and characteristics of family members and trace the threads that bind us. Excavating these visual meditations has been a means of reckoning with who we are, where we come from, and how we connect across time.
Gregg Segal studied photography and film at California Institute of the Arts (BFA) dramatic writing at New York University (MFA) and education at The University of Southern California (MA). Segal’s photography has been recognized by American Photography, Communication Arts, PDN, Investigative Reporters and Editors, The New York Press Club, the Society of Publication Designers, Lens Culture, and the Magnum Photography Awards. Segal’s portraiture and photo essays have been featured in Time, GEO, Smithsonian, The Independent, Le Monde, Fortune, National Geographic Adventure and Wired, among others. His first monograph Daily Bread was published by Powerhouse Books in 2019 and a German edition of Daily Bread followed in 2020. An exhibition of Daily Bread curated by Photoville is at The Seaport in New York thru August 2024. Segal’s companion project, 7 Days of Garbage, was published in The Evidence Project: A Book to Protect the Planet.
MEGAN SINCLAIR | PORTLAND, OR
A Preservation Of Character 37, 2022.
Gelatin Silver Print,
16 x 20 inches, Framed.
Edition #1 of 5.
I long to see the world as I once did. I long to feel the world as I once did.
In A Preservation of Character I use the act of removal to incite vulnerability. I shed a cold exterior and ground myself with what remains. I remove my clothing, a physical layer of protection. I remove the hair from my head, a totem of gender. I attempt to let go of protective behavior, expression, and thought. What I feel shields me from danger in the outside world has become a part of who I present myself as. Here I am neighbored only by textures, shapes, and light, leaving me to observe and interact with myself. Who am I without these defenses? I look at the changes in my character and remember this vulnerability as something that once came easily.
Megan Sinclair’s large format self-portraits explore her relationship with body, mind, and environment; using vulnerability to process and heal trauma. She builds in-home sets; minimizing distractions by reducing and controlling her environments. She graduated with her Bachelor’s of Photography in 2020 from California State University, Sacramento, and has since exhibited in galleries across the country and internationally. She was awarded Finalist of the Head On Portrait Award, Best in Black and White at the Montgomery Photo Festival, received an honorable mention in the Julia Margaret Cameron Awards and a nomination for the Black and White Spider Awards, and has been published by Fotofilmic and F-Stop Magazine. She is currently based in Portland, Oregon, USA, and is an active member of The Portland Darkroom as well as on the exhibition committee of Blue Sky Gallery.
BRAD TEMKIN | CHICAGO, IL
Aqueduct 1 & 2 at The Cascades - Sylmar, CA 2021.
Archival Inkjet Print,
30 x 24 inches.
Edition of 8.
Aqueduct
Urbanization has a long history of money and politics influencing water policy in the west, and Los Angeles is a prime example of this. With two aqueducts, several reservoirs, and dams between the Owens Valley and the city of Los Angeles, this project examines the topography and illustrates the context of when the aqueduct was built, and how we are meeting today’s challenges of water rights and delivery to large cities, while highlighting environmental restoration that occurs to the land and wildlife.
Brad Temkin’s work is held in numerous permanent collections, including those of The Art Institute of Chicago; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Amon Carter Museum; Eastman Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Photography, among others. His images have appeared in esteemed publications as Aperture, Black & White Magazine, TIME Magazine and European Photography. He has been recognized through various grants and fellowships, notably a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017 and multiple Illinois Arts Council Fellowships in 2007 and 2024. Temkin has published three books: Private Places: Photographs of Chicago Gardens (Center for American Places) 2005; Rooftop (Radius Books) 2015; and The State Of Water (Radius Books) 2019. He has taught at Columbia College Chicago since 1984.
ANDRE RAMOS-WOODARD | HOUSTON, TX
authenticity (2 CHAINZ), 2022.
Digital Illustration, Colored Pencil, and Pastel on Archival Inkjet Print,
28 x 21 inches, Framed.
Edition #1 of 5.
Anti-Blackness seems inescapably mixed into whatever context I place it into; literature, science, government, health, art... look into any “field” and see for yourself. My people have had to cry, scream, and fight for respect for centuries, and we still have not gained the full respect we deserve. In order to move past the damage this has done to our society, we can’t simply deny our history—we must recognize it. We should not hide it because it cannot be erased. We must acknowledge the many ways in which this country has perpetuated a racial hierarchy since these lands were first colonized and stripped from indigenous peoples, and Black people were stolen from their native land and brought to America.
In BLACK SNAFU, I appropriate various depictions of Black people that I find throughout the history of cartooning and juxtapose them with photographs that celebrate and line up more authentically with my Black experience. The photographs I create vary in subject matter; I seek to include celebratory portraits, didactic still lives, and representational documentations of places rich in their relation to Black community, allowing me to fight back against the history of the racist caricature that I reclaim in my work. By combining these ambivalent visual languages, I intend to expose to viewers America’s deplorable connection to anti-Black tropes through pop culture while simultaneously celebrating the reality of what it means to be Black.
André Ramos-Woodard (he/ they) was raised in the Southern states of Tennessee and Texas. He is a photo-based artist who uses their work to emphasize the experiences of the marginalized communities while accenting the repercussions of contemporary and historical discrimination. His art conveys ideas of communal and personal identity, influenced by their direct experience with life as a queer African American. Focusing on Black liberation, queer justice, and the reality of mental health, he aspires for his art to help bring power to the people.
Selected for Foam Museum’s Foam TALENT Award in 2024 and a two-time top-50 Finalist for Photolucida’s Critical Mass (in 2020 and 2023), Ramos-Woodard has shown their work at various institutions across the United States a beyond, including the Foam Museum–The Netherlands, Amsterdam, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston–Houston, Texas, Leon Gallery– Denver, Colorado, and FILTER Photo–Chicago, Illinois. He received his BFA from Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, and his MFA at The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico. André currently works as the Exhibitions and Programs Coordinator at the Houston Center for Photography in Houston, Texas.
KATE WARREN | HUDSON, NY
Stormdoor (Lucille), 2022.
Archival Pigment Print,
50 x 33 inches, Framed.
Edition #1 of 5 + 2AP.
"What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?" – Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action (1977)
A tragic accident in 1970 resulted in the death of my father's young sisters and father, creating a wound that rippled across generations. Family rarely spoke of the loss and forbade access to the albums and ephemera that detailed their lives before the accident, an idyllic mid-century family torn apart by loss. Nine months after moving home to Vermont to care for my mother during the 2020 pandemic, I convinced my family to share the archive with me. I discovered my late grandfather’s lifelong photographic work, which sparked a subversive call and response with my own. Fifty years and two generations later, his domestic images of doting fatherhood contrast with my own queer gaze. The Slit counteracts the dehumanizing effects of growing up raised in the dual closets of emotional and queer repression within a conservative Catholic family. Staged photographs, installations, and quilt sculptures operate as tools of remembrance and resistance, subverting family mythologies within a queer register. I perform as close and distant kin, both male and female, living and dead. Precise use of period details allows the images to oscillate between the vernacular and cinematic, shifting family mythologies to create space for the emergence of queer feminist futures.
My photographs appropriate the aesthetics of "traditional family values” by making visible gender fluid alternatives. What does it mean to be the "man of the house" as a non-binary dyke? My portrayals of female masculinity offset harm caused by restrictive norms, offering soft butchness as an antidote to emotionally restrictive masculinities. I blur the line between fact and fiction as time seems to fold in on itself across generations. Queer culture celebrates self-identification, an essential component of finding meaningful identity as a member of a marginalized community. By processing my father's intergenerational grief through the rituals of picture-making, I attempt to create queer histories I can call my own.
Kate Warren (b. 1988) is a queer artist and educator based in Hudson, NY. She explores intimacy, memory, and grief through photography, archival interventions, and quilt works that re-examine established histories and exhume hidden pasts. Her work uses shared vulnerability as a catalyst for connection, bridging taboos that include sex, spirituality, and loss. Raised in the mountains of Vermont, she finds that connection to community, the land, and rural romanticism underpin her work. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University, and has exhibited at the California Museum of Photography, Light Work, University of Iowa, and Washington Project for the Arts.
SASHA WATERS-FREYER | RICHMOND, VA
Ghost Protists, 2024.
Video Projection with Sound
TRT 4:30
Three recent short experimental / essay films turn a feminist lens onto the history of photography and cinema – “magic lantern” glass slides in "Fragile," pop culture romance in "Ashes of Roses," and the troubling early history of the cyanotype "Ghost Protists." It is the latter of these three, "Ghost Protists" that I submit for consideration as a 4.5-minute looping video projection with sound. A protist is an organism that is neither animal, vegetable nor fungi. Plant-like protists are called algae – such as those “flowers of the sea” cyanotypes created by Anna Atkins and published in a landmark book in 1843. In a mesmerizing frenzy of images and text, "Ghost Protists" transforms her images into a protest of the historical erasure of the colonial violence that enabled their creation.
Sasha Waters is a moving image artist and Professor of Film at Virginia Commonwealth University. Since 1998, she has produced and directed 18 documentary, experimental, and short essay films, 14 of which originate in 16mm. Her 2022 short essay film Fragile premiered at the Festival ECRÃ in Rio de Janeiro, and has screened at venues in Taipei, Saigon, Cesena, Los Angeles, Cambridge and more, including a month-long video installation in March 2023 at the Chapel of the Carmelites in Toulouse as a part of Traverse Vidéo. Sasha’s earlier films have been shown at the Telluride Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Kassel Dokfest, IMAGES in Toronto, Microscope Gallery, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, the Tribeca, Ann Arbor, Woodstock, Chicago Underground, Big Sky Documentary Film Festivals and the Museum of the Moving Image among other international locales.
YUYANG ZHANG | PORTLAND, OR
earnestly study the congress document, 2022.
Trimmed Archival Inkjet Print, Archival Adhesive,
21 x 21 inches, Framed.
Edition #1 of 5.
try harder, 2022.
Trimmed Archival Inkjet Print, Ink Archival Adhesive,
21 x 21 inches, Framed.
Edition #1 of 5.
Yuyang Zhang’s collages that playfully yet delicately navigate the complex channel of cultural hybridity, queer identity, immigration, and diasporic experience. Layers of old Chinese propaganda posters, screenshots, and personal photographs strip the subjects out of context and place them in contemporary American settings. Historic communist propaganda is repurposed to bridge past and present-day China, seamlessly blending with American iconography. The juxtaposition creates fantastical narratives built upon fragments deconstructed from the original. Meanwhile, subtle visual cues in these pieces allude to the continuous tension between China and the United States. The resulting work exposes sources of persistent stereotypes and prejudices that often burden people from China or with Chinese heritage.
The amalgamation of media shapes its balance between levity and seriousness, beauty and sorrow, peace and tension. These collages foster a space for audiences with a wide range of backgrounds, especially for people of geographical or cultural displacement, to recognize themselves. Audiences are welcome to escape, re-imagine, multiply, and heal in this space.
Yuyang Zhang (b.1993, Wuhan, China, he/him/his) is a Portland, Oregon based multi-disciplinary artist. He holds a BS in Hospitality and Tourism Management from Purdue University and an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art. His work manifests the experience of being a chronically online diasporic gay. Zhang enthusiastically references Taylor Swift and Wanda Maximoff a.k.a. Scarlet Witch in his work. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Blue Sky Gallery (Portland), and Fuller Rosen Gallery (Philadelphia). Group exhibitions include Portland Chinatown Museum, Heaven Gallery (Chicago), B-Part Gallery (Berlin, Germany), among others. Zhang has been featured in publications including New York Times, Oregon ArtsWatch, The Philadelphia Inquirer, AINT-BAD, The Hand Magazine, Buckman Journal, and BOOOOOOM. His work is part of the Soho House Portland, and Regional Arts & Cultural Council Public Arts Collections. Zhang works at Blue Sky, Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts as the Communications Manager.