EXHIBITION CATALOG | High Water by Emily White

Candela Gallery is thrilled to present High Water, a debut solo exhibition by Richmond, Virginia based photographer, Emily White. In response to our modern world, inundated by digital diversions and perpetual tail-chasing, Emily White has staked out essential and reverent landscapes. White approaches the landscape genre using a mix of 19th century and contemporary processes and manages to bridge the nostalgia for a familiar place and the discordant emotions of the southern wilds.

While exploring process and genre, much of the resonance in White’s serene and mantic images, a mix of tintypes and darkroom prints, is tethered to White’s overflowing feelings of home, of her southern roots, and her search for refined stillness in a chaotic world. Weaving together several distinct bodies, High Water’s textural studies of thick water, overgrown greenery, and enveloping canopies of elongated trees thread a universal narrative that reminds us again, despite all of our protests, that nature is going to have the last word. 

Emily White (b. 1990, Bremo Bluff, VA) is an artist known for utilizing historic photographic processes to reframe the contemporary landscape, addressing cultural narratives relating to nature, connection and identity. Taking her mobile darkroom along backroads, highways and alleys, she frames urban edens, rural sprawl and the blur in between. She is building an archive of perception— attempting to fix emotional responses to the modern natural world. Documenting physical, spiritual and environmental shapes, her practice is not confined by the processes she utilizes, but rather they serve as a means of accessing the space between truth and fiction. Her works vary from original tintypes to large-scale darkroom prints, seeking to make a living image by any means necessary.