ARTIST BREAKDOWN P.IV: UnBound11!
UnBound11!
ANNUAL JURIED + INVITATIONAL EXHIBITION
July 1 - August 6, 2022
Follow along over the next few weeks as we spotlight works currently on view at Candela Gallery. This summer group exhibition is our annual open call and is dedicated to featuring a wide range of photographic artworks, fine art photography, and artist books. We are proud of UnBound's mission to generate opportunities and exposure beyond the traditional group or juried show by providing a collection opportunity for artists. All funds raised throughout the show, help us reach our 2022 goal of 10k to support participating artists by acquiring work into the Candela Collection, which will one day be donated to an institution. Visit our shop to give, purchase the exhibition catalog, and/or snag some Candela merch. 100% of the proceeds raised will go towards supporting participating artists.
NOAH DOELY
Distortion Vessels, 2020. Cyanotype, 25 x 34 inches. Edition 1 of 5 +1 AP. $3000, Framed
The works in this series are printed as cyanotypes: a photographic process invented in 1842 by the English scientist and astronomer Sir John Herschel. I am interested in the ways that different forms of photography from different eras mediate and transform the subject matter they depict. In this case, how the Prussian blue inherent to the cyanotype process subverts, enhances, camouflages, or otherwise alters how the images' content is perceived.
PALOMA DOOLEY
Matthew and Diva's Goodbye Party, 2021. Archival Pigment Print, 25 x 31 inches. Edition 3 of 12 + 2 AP. $700
This image are from my ongoing project, Distancely, which is an exploration of growth and stagnation, loss and gain, loneliness and community. I created Distancely in response to the turmoil I have felt over the course of the past two years. Unable to roam, and out of work, I turned to my garden as my only creative outlet in 2020-2021. I set my camera aside and thought of my plants as my source of peace and strength amidst the crushing anxiety and uncertainty of life during a global pandemic. Feeling a dearth of change and growth in my personal life, I focused instead on the quick lives of my plants. Growth, abundance, decline, death—caring for my plants was a way to care for myself. Eventually, my desire to examine these simultaneous feelings of deep grief and true gratitude was a way back into photography.
After several years of photographing the landscape on the road around Southern California and making work about matters (and manners) of land and resource use, I decided to take a more experimental and multi-modal approach to photographing the limited space of my garden and yard. Turning inward and working in just one setting over a long period of time forced me to challenge my previous habits of image making and embrace methods unfamiliar to me. I created portraits and still lifes of the plants themselves, photographed the landscape of the garden, played with inserting myself into some of my images, and, finally, experimented with making collaborative and situational portraits with my loved ones and neighbors. I alternated between inviting them to recreate and reenact moments, events, chores, or routines for the camera, and taking a less involved, more observational and serendipitous approach to incorporating them within the frame of the image.
I shoot 8x10 color film with the intent to produce large—sometimes wall-sized, larger than life—prints in which viewers can immerse themselves. To achieve this, I blend analog and digital techniques by shooting film, then scanning, painstakingly color correcting, and removing dust before an archival inkjet print can be made.
ANDREW FROST
The Last Catamount, 2022. Archival Pigment Print, 20 x 16 inches. Edition of 20 + 2 AP. $350
The snow softly crunches underfoot as I make my way up the hillside in the growing dark. The familiar landscape transforms as the shadows lengthen, old friends shifting into dark mysteries. The sounds change as the temperature drops, the last bits of sun giving way to the gloaming and approaching night. For a moment, I believe I am lost. A quick chill of fear escapes my resolve before I regain my composition. A shape emerges in the distance—the outline of a cabin, a black blot against the dark sky. Relief rushes through my body. I enter and shut out the night. It’s quiet and safe, though I’m not alone.
My photographic work over the last decade has circled around my lifelong search for a place to belong. I was born in Japan and have moved dozens of times over my life, never staying in one place long enough to develop a connection. At the same time, my father is the fourteenth generation to have grown up in the same small town in Vermont, a lineage pre-dating statehood. This disconnect is the start of my most recent photographic project, tentatively titled The Couching Lion.
This title comes from the largely forgotten early European name for the mountain we now call Camel’s Hump. Couching is an antiquated term for a crouching, ready to pounce animal.
Despite, or perhaps because, my Vermont ancestry, I have an uneasy relationship with this place. At once, I have deep connections, yet simultaneously I am a newcomer. This project, while still in progress, begins to channel that relationship by examining the space between the so-called natural world and the human world while questioning the existence of such an artificial divide. The images are balanced squarely in the indexical language of photography, yet they seek to upend the photographic window by transforming the world in front of the lens into a new place. A place connected to the familiar, yet distinctly strange. Within this new grayscale world anything might happen, old and long forgotten things manifest, suggestions of the past or future appear, disappear, or simply fade into the night.
WILLIAM GLASER WILSON
Untitled 64, 2022. Oil, Acrylic, Colored Pencil
on Archival Inkjet Print, 65 x 44 inches. Unique. $6000
Working within the intersections of painting, drawing, and photography, Wilson’s works on paper reflects upon the energy and spontaneity embedded within children’s literature and the unencumbered psychological freedom of ones youth. Using images and illustrations captured and gathered during caregiving, these works visualize the ephemeral nature of infancy.
DANIEL GONÇALVES
Paulo Jorge Ferreira, cavaleiro, 2021. Archival Pigment Print, 24 x 19 inches. Edition 1 of 8 + 2AP. $1200
Saudade - a deep emotional state of melancholic longing characteristic of the Portuguese temperament for a person or thing that is absent, and the acknowledged impossibility of attaining what is longed for.
Saudade explores the lives of Portuguese people residing in agricultural towns which are intertwined with the Portuguese bloodless bullfighting community in California's Central Valley.
This series includes portraits inspired by Flemish paintings of the 15-17th centuries. The Flemish immigrated to the Azores (islands off the coast of Portugal) in the 15th century. Since there was such a large Flemish settlement, the Azores were known as the Flemish Islands. The Portuguese diaspora of California mainly came from this Portuguese archipelago. There has always been a class system in Portuguese bullfighting, with ""cavaleiros"" fighting on horseback, representing nobility, and ""forcados"" representing the working class cowboy. With these portraits I am aiming to put the different types of bullfighters on a level field, photographing them all in a similar way while contrasting their differences.
