UnBound12! Artist Features: V
UNBOUND12!
July 7 – August 12
Join us for a breakdown of our annual juried + invitational photography exhibition. Each week, we’ll share information about our artists and the processes behind their pieces in the show.
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 a notable arts institution. This year, we’re also hoping to extend the reach of funding, using a portion to help cover return shipments for artists who need it.
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, or helping to cover an artist’s exhibition expenses. No matter what, your funds support an UnBound12! artist.
ANIA MOUSSAWEL | MIAMI, FL
Great-Grandmother's, 2021.
Archival Pigment Print, 12 x 16 inches.
Edition #2 of 6 + 2AP. $250, Framed.
My work in photography and video explores notions of family, memory, and loss through portraiture, rituals, and observations of daily life. My family’s cultures, Cuban and Lebanese, are central themes within my work, often using the homes of my maternal and paternal grandmothers as the setting. As a second generation American, I observe the details of their homes, feeling like a foreigner at times, even though I have known these places nearly my whole life. I have photographed in the home of my maternal grandparents extensively, documenting their daily lives. It shows different generations as they grow and age, rituals and practices that have now been left behind, and the life that continues after the loss of a family member. In making this work, I piece together a visual narrative of an immigrant family, while connecting with my own identity.
My recent photographic series “The Days are Long”, examines the complex relationship between mother and daughter over generations in my family. The title comes from the parenting adage, “The days are long, but the years are short”. Meant as advice for new parents, I heard or read some version of this phrase often after becoming a mom. The images center around my grandmother, mother, daughter, and myself. My family immigrated to the United States from Cuba and Lebanon in the 1970s. The women in my Cuban and Lebanese families have responsibilities that are intrinsic to their roles as mothers including providing, caregiving, and upholding traditions from their countries. Although our experiences have changed from generation to generation, the way these responsibilities have shaped our identity have remained.
Ania Moussawel is an artist and educator from Miami, Florida. She received a BFA in photography from Barry University in Miami Shores, FL and an MFA in Photo, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York, NY. Her work in photography and video explores notions of family, memory, and loss through portraiture, rituals, and observations of daily life. Her family’s cultures, Cuban and Lebanese, are central themes within her work, often using the homes of her maternal and paternal grandmothers as the setting. Her work shows different generations as they grow and age, rituals and practices that have now been left behind, and the life that continues after the loss of a family member. In making this work, she attempts to piece together a visual narrative of an immigrant family, while connecting with her own identity.
Moussawel has exhibited her work in group shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Filter Photo, Center for Fine Art Photography, Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, Masur Museum of Art, Center for Book Arts, Museum of Art Ft. Lauderdale, among other venues. She has had solo shows at Soho Photo Gallery, O’Cinema in partnership Oolite Arts, and Florida International University.
Moussawel was a finalist in Photolucida’s 2022 Critical Mass, a semifinalist in the 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from the National Portrait Gallery, the winner of the 2022 Miami Individual Artist Stipend and the 2021 Ellies Teacher Travel Grant from Oolite Arts. She was also the winner of the 2022 Soho Photo Gallery International Portfolio Competition. Her work is in the collection of Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz at Girls’ Club, Ft. Lauderdale, Allentown Art Museum, Miami-Dade Public Library System, and Jaffe Center for Book Arts. Moussawel lives and works in Miami, FL, where she lives with her husband, two children, and two dogs.
LAUREN GRABELLE | BIGFORK, MT
Rebirth, 2019. Archival Pigment Print, 12 x 16 inches. Edition #1 of 7 + 2AP. $900.
While living on a remote Montana ranch where the land is bordered by mountains and forest, and shared with top apex predators including grizzly bears, I’ve become focused on having a new understanding of birth, life, flight, death, and the transitions in between. I am also making images of comfort while searching for myself in a land that is not about me.
Originally from NJ, Lauren Grabelle moved to Montana to heal the wounds that are created by living in the most densely populated state and being so isolated from nature. Her photographic practice falls in the matrix where fine art and documentary meet, where she can tell truths about our relationships to other people, animals, nature, and ourselves. Her work is about empathy.
Grabelle’s photographs have been included in exhibitions in galleries across the US and Europe, and in September 2018 at Gulf Photo Plus in Dubai, UAE. In 2021 the series, The Last Man was recognized by LensCulture as a winner in the international photo competition HOME '21, and then in 2022 as a Critical Mass TOP 50 winner. In 2022 Ken Burns included one of Grabelle’s photos in his book, Our America: A Photographic History. Other projects have been featured in print and online in Harper's Magazine, The New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, High Country News, Humble Arts Foundation, Der Grief, Lenscratch, World Photo Organization, and others, as well as selected by jury for inclusion in American Photography 10, 17, 36, & 39.
Grabelle is an Adobe Stock Premium contributor, a member of Women Photograph, and a photo editor for The Whitefish Review.
MARTIN VENEZKY | DETROIT, MI
Objects to be Photographed (Marked), 2023. Archival Pigment Print, 22 x 17 inches. Edition #2 of 5 + 3AP. $2000, Framed.
My photography practice brings together disparate, modest objects into a composite whole. Each of my works is built from many parts, but each begins with a single form, a lone picture or a stray object. From that beginning, I perform a conscious act of construction. Slowly. Watching and assessing as each new element engages with the group. Does it merge seamlessly? Or will it confront and disturb the others?
This seems like such a simple, quiet activity, but it is a process buzzing with active discovery. Each addition tests and shifts the logic and stability of the group. New questions emerge. Where do the abstract and concrete divide? Does a pattern on a sheet of paper retain its abstraction, or does it become a concrete object? What does the image want to become, and what does it demand of me?
The gradual accumulation of elements is sometimes peaceful, sometimes conflicting. But as they impose their physicality against each other, their voices erupt into something powerful. They mass, and converge, and their stories expand. What was just a background becomes an infinite space. What was a single incidence of light becomes a swarm. Each is a visual “sound” joining into melody, deepening their harmony, occasionaly crumbling into noise.
The original objects themselves are of little value. They are used, disassembled, and often discarded. Bits from plastic toys, chunks of glass, metal rods, crumbled paper. Humble, crude, and mute. And the pictures they sit for are hardly portraits but more like the curious optical impressions left behind while testing the lights.
Some elements are built from photo prints themselves—rolling and stacking, folding and pinning them together. I infuse others with drawings and marks in paint and crayon. The freedom to fabricate new form from new materials without a clear sense of how they will be used is an indulgence I'm grateful for here at school.
In some cases the results are a kind of photographic science fiction, mysterious contraptions with inscrutable utility. In others, a deadpan optical conundrum confronts and resists transcendence. My curiosity rests in all of these convergences; how an accumulation of sensation builds its own meaning through proximity and community, as absent from language as possible; and how, through photography, abstract form can still tell stories.
Martin Venezky is a designer, artist, and educator specializing in book design and typography. Throughout his career, Venezky has maintained a deep and continued interest in photographic process, form generation, and abstraction. For the past several years, he has created extensive bodies of work in photography and photographic installation.
Venezky has an undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College and an MFA in Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He has taught at RISD and CalArts and, for almost thirty years, at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He is currently Professor in the Graduate Design Program.
In 2001 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art honored Venezky with a solo exhibition, and, in 2005, his monograph, It Is Beautiful...Then Gone, was published by Princeton Architectural Press.
Among other honors, Venezky was invited into the esteemed Alliance Graphique Internationale, and San Francisco’s Letterform Archive has recently acquired an extensive collection of his work, studies and process for their permanent collection.
Although a longtime resident of San Francisco, Venezky has recently relocated to Michigan to study towards an MFA in Photography at Cranbrook, thirty years after receiving his design degree from the same institution. He is using this time to make his work a catalyst for further reflection, while exploring its connections to the adjacent practices of architecture, drawing, and sculpture.
WILL CONNALLY | RICHMOND, VA
Effigy in White Birch, 2022. Archival Inkjet Print, Scanned from Film, 36 x 48 inches. Edition #1 of 8 + 2AP. $1650, Framed.
Will Connally’s photographs are based on an imagined narrative that emerges from the fictional Lake Elster, a rural north-eastern lake. To stage these photographs, he has developed a series of short stories, sketches, fabricated props, and a detailed timeline spanning over 370 years from the discovery of the lake. The works purposefully disguise narrative elements, encouraging viewers to imagine the untold pieces.
Each photograph is a portrait of a Lake Elster resident, as recounted by unreliable narrator Wade Lagarde. Specific figures from his memory inhabit these scenes and can be traced throughout the series, from the brutal discovery of the lake by Jesuit priests and French fur-trappers in the 17th century (led by Father Seneschal Brulotte and Henri Babeurre), and the ensuing conflict with the native Abenaki Indians, on to more contemporary times with the Wolframs and the introduction of Maeve Devlin, who recently happened upon Elster.
Significant objects in the photographs stand as attributes of characters who are often absent from the images. Stage-like, fabricated elements act as a rupture, heightening the subjective nature of the narrative. The original stories embedded in the images, as remembered by Wade, get further distorted with each new read.
Will Connally is a photo-based artist whose practice encompasses fiction writing, set design, performance, and installation. In addition to drawing inspiration from personal narratives, his original work is influenced by literary sources, film noir, and amateur theater productions.
Connally received his MFA in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art and his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. He was a resident at Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada, and was awarded a Professional Fellowship from The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He has presented his work in exhibitions and artist lectures internationally, has artwork in the permanent collection of Cranbrook Art Museum, and was recently an artist in residence at Arteles Creative Center in Hameenkyro, Finland.
JOOEUN BAE | SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA
Different Lives but Same Thoughts, 2021. Archival Pigment Print, 15.5 x 10.5 inches. Edition #1 of 1. $2000, Framed.
In 2014, my mother went through surgery because she was diagnosed with skin cancer on her face. It made me afraid of the surgery because I could not be with her for her operation. After the successful surgery, she had to undergo chemotherapy. Although the operation and chemotherapy gave her a scar on her face and weakness to her body, she was only getting better and healthier. In fall 2020, I had to undergo an operation to get rid of a cyst. Witnessing my mother's healing process got me brave, and the surgery went well. After facing the surgery indirectly and directly, I realized collage is like an operation. Collage makers have to cut the fragile paper, like a patient's feeble body, following the line carefully and delicately. Then, the cut fragments are pasted together by tapes, glues, and stitching methods. When the stitch-up part is done, the surgery provides a cure, and the collage gives a new art piece.
When I was little, a few family members lived in Japan, so we often visited them. During the visits, Japanese colored papers got my most attention. The colored papers had a wide range of colors, patterns, and textures, so I filled my backpack with them. I made as many things as I wanted with them because making a crane with the same method, every crane looked distinctive according to the paper's color, pattern, and texture. As a photographer, I embody the diversity of expressions of paper by making my own prints with my photos.
I moved to America to study by myself for a decade during my adolescent period. I did not know much about American cultures and language like a blank canvas. However, the more time I spent in America, the more brush strokes were filling the blank canvas. The period that I lived in South Korea and the time I stayed in the states were different, but they harmonized well, which formed 'me.' I feel this harmony from making a collage with many different cutouts, so I believe collage is the best medium to describe 'me.'
Jooeun Bae is a photographer that works with a collage medium. Her love of collage comes from her experience of adolescence. During the ten years of living in America, she was able to form a sense of herself that harmonized Korean, her human nature, and the American culture in her. As her adolescence, she was fascinated with the idea of making one by mixing different elements. Thus, collage is an essential method that allows her to put her imagination together.
SANDRA STARK | BOSTON, MA
The Gesture, 2021.
Archival Pigment Print, 20 x 15 inches. Open Edition. $2800, Framed.
Working exclusively in the studio while referencing the Great Outdoors with the backdrops I choose, I construct theatrical still lifes suggesting narratives and mysterious undertakings about Nature. Photography uniquely captures the collision of intentionality and chance. More often employed in street photography, this collision in the studio helps me create destabilizing and enigmatic still lifes.
I have been interested in photography since I was twelve years old when my father took me into his darkroom, and suddenly the head of my brother appeared on a white piece of paper in a tray. I have been in wondrous rapture to photography ever since. One of the first photos I made was with a green Girl Scout camera my father gave me. I constructed a screen house around a chaise lounge in the backyard, got inside and yelled for my father to take a picture of me. I have always been interested in making a picture instead of taking a picture I am acutely and forever interested in contemporary photography while remaining true to my own personal narrative. I am interested in historical still lifes, painted and photographic, and contemporizing them with humor and theatrical flair. Influences are many: Josef Svoboda’s scenic designs, William Henry Fox Talbot’s still lifes, Hippolyte Bayard’s “Self Portrait as a Drowned Man” c. 1840, the color palette and surrealism of Paul Outerbridge, Alfred Hitchcock, etc.
Photographing is the theatre of my life.
Sandra Stark recently retired from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts, Emerita, where she taught full-time in the Photography Department for 40 years. She has had exhibitions at the Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston; National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian, Washington, DC; Houston Center of Photography; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA; Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; Harvard University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. ; Columbia University, NY. and University of NH Art Museum.
She has received numerous grants and has been a visiting artist at Princeton University, Rhode Island School of Design, San Francisco Camerawork, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Harvard's Fogg Museum; and numerous private collections. She has enjoyed three residencies at The MacDowell Colony, NH.
Stark is also a professional fiddle player who has played with well-known old-time bands around the country, The Chicken Chokers; Any Old Time Stringband; and Primitive Characters.
She is represented by the Anderson Yezerski Gallery, Boston. (originally Howard Yezerski Gallery).
HEATHER BEARDSLEY | VA BEACH, VA
Strange Plants, Paris, 2022. Mixed Media, 8 x 10 inches. Unique. $600, Framed.
Strange Plants, Virginia Beach, 2022. Mixed Media, 8 x 10 inches. Unique. $500, Framed.
In 2017 I visited Pripyat, the ghost town closest to the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Over the past thirty years nature that was destroyed by human hubris and incompetence has grown up to dominate the abandoned man-made structures. I began to draw and embroider plants overtaking the people and buildings onto photographs of Budapest, the city I was living in, sourced from old architecture books found in thrift stores. Since then I have added photographs to this series with each new city my art has taken me to, including Vienna, Beijing, Chicago, Kyiv and Las Vegas. Although presented in a whimsical fashion, using an intimate scale and a “feminine” craft technique like embroidery, on closer examination the implications of these pieces become more sinister. As plants seemingly grow uncontrollably through the buildings and streets, people are either absent or oblivious to the situation. Viewers are left to wonder about this change in dynamic, what preceded it, and what will prevent it. The resulting works exist in an ambiguous space: a shift in the dynamic has clearly occurred, but nature has fought back and new life has grown from it.
Heather Beardsley is an American visual artist that creates mixed-media projects at the intersection of art, science, and environmental issues. She works primarily with embroidery, cyanotype, and air-dry clay, mixing the aesthetics of scientific illustration with craft and children’s art materials to play with display conventions and visual hierarchies. Beardsley received her MFA in fiber and material studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015, and her BA in studio art from the University of Virginia in 2009. After completing her master’s, she spent a year in Vienna, Austria on a Fulbright Scholarship for Installation Art, and in 2017, she was awarded a year-long Braunschweig Projects International Artist Fellowship by the Ministry of Science and Culture for Lower Saxony, Germany. Through a series of international residencies, travel has become an important aspect of Beardsley’s art; she incorporates elements from cities she’s visited to into her projects. Some of her residencies include KulturKontakt Austria in Vienna; Shangyuan Art Museum in Beijing, China; IZOLYATSIA in Kyiv, Ukraine; Rogers Art Loft in Las Vegas; Sirius Arts Centre in Ireland; and La Box in Bourges, France. Beardsley has shown her work both nationally and internationally, including group exhibitions at Science Gallery Dublin, Museo del Traje in Madrid, the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, and Museum Rijswijk in the Netherlands.
MEG ROUSSOS | SEATTLE, WA
Untitled, Structures, 4, 2021.
Archival Pigment Print, 20 x 25 inches.
Edition #1 of 5 + 1AP. $1800, Framed.
Untitled, Structures, is a sculptural representation of a functional technique used to protect structures from wildfires. This work is inspired by a backcountry cabin I stumbled upon during my thru-hike on the Continental Divide Trail in the Bob Marshall Wilderness in 2015. I was fascinated by the aluminum wrapping and began to emulate the practice as site-specific installations. Although this encasing provides comfort and protection, it is not a solution for the root cause. I hope this series raises awareness of our environmental crisis, creates individual connections to our warming earth, and fosters hope.
Meg Roussos is an artist that has completed the three major U.S. long distance hiking trails, over 8,000 miles. Her work engages in a dialogue about what it means to physically experience the landscape cultivated from her personal experiences in the wilderness. Roussos uses photography in the traditional sense to yield a picture but also as the medium to document installations and performances. Her site-responsive art requires dragging materials into the landscape, carrying her camera and sinking in the snow. She works across multiple disciplines to allow her ideas to take form in traditional imagery, photographic artist books, documentation of land art, or videos. Most recently she was in residence at MJR Projects in Bainbridge Island, WA, Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, CO, and will take part in The Arctic Circle Residency expedition in 2024.
JENNYLYN PAWELSKI | SAVANNAH, GA
Weakfish in Glow of Headlamp, 2021. Archival Pigment Print, 14 x 11 inches. Open Edition. $500, Framed.
Fort Pulaski Bridge is an in-progress project. Crossing the Savannah River just before it meets the Atlantic River, the bridge to Fort Pulaski National Monument is a popular fishing spot and gathering place for locals and tourists alike. The photographs are an informal study of this microcosm of coastal life, its marine inhabitants and the humans interacting with them.
Jenny Pawelski is a photographer living and working in Savannah, Georgia.