ARTIST BREAKDOWN P.VIII: 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.
ANNE ROWLAND
“How Can You Stand It,” 2022. Digital Pigment Print, 50 x 37.75 inches. Edition 1 of 4 + 1 AP. $5000
Look out the window of an airplane. Look down and see the big picture. There it is, all laid out. The beauty of the natural landscape, and the human interventions on it. From this height, just looking, nothing is required of us. We are untethered from the ordinary concerns of everyday life. The physical world offers itself up for study and wonder. Much is revealed and all is potential. The view seduces with possibility.
Satellites and airplanes equipped with special cameras record from above like big eyes in the sky, looking down, surveilling the world. Providing an almost seamless view on the internet, software blends the discreet still images together and uploads them to platforms such as Google Maps. But unlike the view from an airplane, there is no horizon, no endpoint, no destination in sight. When seen on the computer screen, this imagery is an impossible view, like a giant flatbed scan of the world. There is no hierarchy in this view, no foreground and no background. Everything that is visible is made equal.
It is unlimited material, an extravaganza of optical pleasure.
This work is made with appropriated aerial imagery, primarily from the Satellite view provided by Google Maps and Bing Maps. I scroll over the landscape, making hundreds of screenshots, and then combine them in the computer into a big coherent aerial view of a particular landscape. This base layer then serves as a foundation from which to extract and alter what is there. I add additional aerial imagery from other locations. I use the evidence of human activity such as construction projects, housing developments, roads, bridges, and agricultural features, as well as the untouched landscape, as subject matter to be transformed, altered or removed. The Charles River is made an unnatural acid orange color. Giant McMansions in the suburbs are made to disappear. Deserts are compressed into flowing ribbons. Roads are curved around like snakes and whips, transformed into abstract gestures. I am responding to the aerial landscape pictured on the computer screen, inventing a vocabulary out of highways, rivers, and fields: landscape features become material for mark making. I am drawing with the geographic forms, painting with the imagery itself, making it into something new. The end result is a subjective rendering that is an accumulation of my actions using the computer and the source imagery. Starting with the machine made pictures from the eye in the sky, at great aesthetic distance, each finished piece is a deeply personal organic abstraction.
CHRISTOPHER SELLECK
I have been working on a larger, long running series of various types of MASCULINITIES that have looked at subgroups of men in often thought hyper-masculine areas related to sports and culture. The polymer photogravures I submitted are a way to address the history of male bodies in the historical context of photography and where they intersect with strength and desire.
Jessie, 2020. Polymer Photogravure on Rives BFK. Paper with Silver, Black, Graphite Inks, 20 x 16 inches, 8 Ply Museum Board. Open Edition. $800, Framed
Mike, 2020. Polymer Photogravure on Rives BFK. Paper with Silver, Black, Graphite Inks, 20 x 16 inches, 8 Ply Museum Board. Open Edition. $800, Framed
BRANDY TRIGUEROS
Through memory, metaphor, and imagined destinies, “There’s No Other Like Your Mother” seeks to explore the complexities and constructs of female identity and the maternal subject as I reconceive my fertile state of being. The sudden death of my mother prompted the (re)birth of my artistic self at the age of 29 and the emergence of this series which contemplates my own shifting identity, once firmly rooted in the domestic tradition but now seemingly unmoored.
Opening, 2021. Archival Pigment Print, 12.9 x 20 inches.
Edition of 10 + 2 AP. $1000 Print, $1225 Framed
This personal photographic juncture examines the psychological inner states of ambiguity and desire as I decide whether to undergo the seminal transformation into matrescence: the anticipation of love and playfulness; the apprehension of bringing a child into a climate changed world and future of ecological uncertainty; the concern of economic insecurity; the fear that not having a child will yield a heavy loneliness.
As the window for becoming pregnant begins to close after turning forty, the vision of motherhood starts to fade and acts as an abject weight in my current state of liminality.
With unmatched expectations of the woman I thought I might become, I navigate through the mercurial metamorphosis of becoming.
JULIE WOLFE
Wonderland: The Optical Unconscious, 2022. Archival Pigment Prints, Silkscreen Prints, Collage, Stab Binding, Linen Thread, Vellum Insert, Rag Paper, French Folds. Closed: 15 x 11.5 x 1 inches; Open: 15 x 25 x 1.5 inches. Edition 3 of 5. $2500
In Wonderland: The Optical Unconscious, Julie Wolfe once again taps into the optical unconscious to reveal something essential about perception. Through juxtaposing images, Wolfe causes patterns to emerge through free association, unleashing apophenia—the process by which humans make meaning out of incidental images—across her pages.
Wolfe works within her own archive of images, appropriating and reappropriating them in new configurations that inspire wonder and pose urgent questions. How do dissonant images relate to one another? How do we relate to them? What can we learn by looking askance, by interrogating the unknown, and by opening ourselves to the unconscious? In her archaeology of form, Wolfe asks us to consider the hidden visual systems at play, their „deep history,“ and their afterlives.
Throughout Wonderland, images are superimposed, dissolving difference into semblance and aligning even disparate elements into a total whole. Vellum prints offer a sort of membrane between the pages' images, blurring them together and putting them into iconographic discussion. Bridging the mundane and the exquisite, the strange and the familiar, and the dissonant and the resonant, Wolfe probes the psychic powers of human experience while making visible the secret life of forms.
