Over the next few weeks, we’ll be highlighting works currently on display here at the gallery. Follow along here and on social media for some background on each maker and their process. The call for this show was centered around 2020: what were the artists’ works-in-progress? What was that one-off piece that felt right in the moment, but didn’t fit into a larger series? What was their current reality? What were their thoughts and feelings about the future?

Candela Gallery is kicking off 2021 with a timely exhibition featuring works by 33 international and national artists.

Candela Gallery is pleased to introduce works created by the 2020 and 2021 graduates of the VCU MFA Photography + Kinetic Imaging Programs. Because we are unable to gather this year for an in-person presentation, we’ve mounted a virtual show highlighting current projects by our friends and neighbors at VCU. Beginning December 4th, learn about the featured artists, read their statements, and view their work online.

Artist Gary Burnley explores how we view images differently in Candela exhibit. By Karen Newton

Candela Gallery is honored to feature an installation of 3436, an ongoing project by Ohemaa Dixon. Experiencing Dixon’s work in person is essential to understanding the artist’s intention. Working as an interdisciplinary artist, Dixon’s large scale works, printed on Habotai Silk, are a direct response to the history and visual trauma of lynching.

Candela Gallery is pleased to present Stranger in the Village by Connecticut based artist and educator, Gary Burnley. Titled after a seminal essay by James Baldwin, Burnley's series, comprised of formal collages, challenges and re-imagines historical portraiture and other narrative, painting conventions emblematic of western culture and history. The artist's process is intuitive, drawing from personal, historical, and collective experiences; each piece is cut from reproductions of traditional portraits, sketches, family archive imagery and yearbook photographs, then carefully reconstructed allowing new meanings to emerge.

Candela Gallery is pleased to present an online exhibition of international artist, Shinya Masuda. A former French chef turned photographer, Masuda's series HANAFUDA SHOUZOKU features a series of digital collages built from everyday objects and brightly colored geometric shapes. The resulting sculptural forms are layered with ideas of materiality, personal narratives, and transformation. Shinya Masuda currently works as a professional photographer in Tokyo, Japan

Candela Books + Gallery is announcing a special juried exhibition: Photography is Dead…Long Live Photography!

Submissions open October 1, 2020 at 8:00am EST and will close October 22, 2020 at 11:59pm EST

Candela Gallery is excited to announce Primitive Visions, the gallery’s debut solo show by mixed-media artist and educator, Holly Roberts. Applying both photography and painting to her practice, Robert’s newest exhibit presents dream-like portraits of the recognizable: familiar places, scenes, and subjects that have been reconstructed and embellished by Robert’s use of collage.

To support our artists, photo friends, and community, near and far, Candela has put together a series of weekly virtual exhibitions called HOMEBOUND. Over the next 5 weeks we will be featuring 1-3 works from 5 different photographers, opening every Tuesday.

wILD cLAY is an exhibition of artworks by Tim Roda, exploring clay and photography as artistic mediums connected by uncharacteristic utility. The works in this exhibition embrace the functional history of clay as a vessel, making photography and material a means of exploratory documentation. The vessels in wILD cLAY function as clay cameras, while also existing as fragile, earthen material and crudely created domestic ecosystems. The resulting pinhole cameras and large scale photographs present questions about freedom and responsibility, raised by curiosity and ingenuity, with regard to our constructed and natural environments.

Body, Object, Image brings together six artists, each with a history working with clay objects, photographic images, and the human body, to elevate their authentic, unvarnished female perspectives. The exhibition features works by Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Teri Frame, Julie Malen, Margaret Meehan, Claire Sherwood, and Xia Zhang.

Alanna Airitam: The Golden Age is a tribute to Black culture and Black histories. In an effort to reframe the narrative of western art history, Airitam reconstructs prominent imagery of power with Black men and women. Dressed in vintage garments and adorned with lush fruit and flowers, Airitam’s majestic portraits confront and recontextualize the way African Americans have been perceived and recorded throughout art’s history.

Since the mid-1990s, Patty Carroll has been examining female identity, both by way of and through domesticity. Anonymous Women is a series of portraits of shrouded women in exuberant drapery, manifested as homespun vignettes of mannequins, inundated with household objects. Carroll approaches the topic of domesticity through the lens of her own life and through other cultures. With a wry but lighthearted humor, the weight of the accouterments is couched comfortably between absolute suffocation and mere decoration.

Candela Books + Gallery is excited to announce BRING A DATE, a celebration of nightlife and music from the mid-1970s to the present day. Through the lens of six established and emerging artists, the exhibition features both still and moving imagery that celebrates America after dark, from the boroughs of New York to the late night denizens of Los Angeles, Chicago and Virginia. Included in this exhibition are works by Michael Abramson, Bill Bernstein, Thurston Howes, Jessica Lehrman, Reuben Radding and Safi Alia Shabaik.

Candela Books + Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by David Emitt Adams. The exhibition will open on Friday, September 6th and will be on view through Sunday, October 27th. Please join us for an opening reception and artist talks on Thursday, September 5th, from 5- 8 pm.

Candela Books + Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Justin James Reed. The exhibition will open on Friday, September 6th and will be on view through Sunday, October 27th. Please join us for an opening reception and artist talks on Thursday, September 5th, from 5- 8 pm.

UnBound! features a wide array of photographic techniques from both emerging and established artists, both locally and abroad. We are very proud to bring you a compelling selection of photographic work for the eighth year in a row!

Dear Leader is a multimedia exhibition that casts a light on the existential weight of nuclear proliferation and the harrowing threat of nuclear violence. These fears generate a deep undercurrent of uncertainty that rests underneath our daily lives. The participating artists seek to provide personal reflections on the past and ask us to consider, if just for the moment, the present and future concerns of nuclear proliferation against our current geopolitical landscape.

Pine Tree Ballads is a poetic memoir, featuring the artist’s daughter, wife, mother, and grandmother as a single protean character (or multiple characters?) vibrating in time, navigating the mysteries and menace of a shared ancestral forest. This deeply personal photographic sequence is part visual narrative of family myths and part origin story. Pine Tree Ballads is fueled by both truth and imagination, which, in many instances are the fundamental ingredients of our personal history. The “docu-literary” structure of this monograph celebrates and fully exploits the duplicitous nature of photography/text to be simultaneously interpreted as both fact and fiction. At the surface, this project explores the emotive, contextual, and material constructs of history, culture, personal identity, memory, and folklore.