UnBound12! Artist Features: VII
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.
SEAN PERRY | AUSTIN, TX
Cooper Union, 2022.
Carbon Ink on Cotton Rag, 26 x 25 inches.
Edition #1 of 8 + 2AP. $2500, Framed.
Sean Perry’s long-term project, 'Gotham,' draws inspiration from Hugh Ferriss' drawings and the mythical city portrayed in films. Through his photographs, Perry aims to capture the atmosphere and grandeur embodied by skyscrapers and other structures. He views these images as vignettes, allowing him to explore the themes of impermanence and the influence of memories on our perception of time.
Sean Perry is a fine-art photographer primarily working in Texas, New York, and Japan. His work centers on architecture, space, and light – illustrating the ambiance felt within built environments. Perry's photographs and books have been acquired by notable private collectors, including Manfred Heiting and Alan Siegel, in addition to being held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Amon Carter Museum, the Haas Arts Special Collections at Yale University, the Wittliff Collections, and the Harry Ransom Center. He has been published widely, including commissions for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Billboard and New York Magazine, as well as featured by Graphis, American Photography, the online magazine L’Oeil de la Photographie, and Photo Journal by Elizabeth Avedon.
Cloverleaf Press published Perry's first limited edition book, Transitory in 2006, and followed with a second title, Fairgrounds in the Fall of 2008. Both were a featured case study in Publish Your Photography Book coauthored by Mary Virginia Swanson & Darius Himes (Princeton Architectural Press, 2011). Perry was also selected as a finalist for the Hasselblad Masters award for his work and book Fairgrounds.
Perry’s work is represented by the Stephen L. Clark Gallery.
LISA DI DONATO | NEW YORK, NY
Ontic Glow #10, 2019.
Tintype, 8 x 10 inches.
Unique + AP. $2100, Framed.
An ongoing series that combines two disparate technologies: the old mass-medium of tintypes with new mass-media imagery found in Google Earth's 3D ground view, ‘Ontic Glow’ reproduces surreal, panoramic sites and remote spaces generated by algorithms in wet plate collodion’s tangible materiality. Irregularities inherent in the photograph's physical chemistry interact with the accidents found in the digital digestion and projection of space. The tintype images raise and blur the distinction between the indexical photographic reproduction of reality and its generation of pictures without a discrete referent.
People ask Google to show them what to see before ever seeing it for themselves so that by now everywhere is familiar but strange. 98% of the Earth’s surface has been reduplicated into another world that, born from observation, paradoxically sits in a new beyond, one unaffected by observers, at least, conscious ones. Only traces of inhabitance appear in the intangible landscapes, as if the future had already been colonized and abandoned, reflecting on the memory of a memory glossed in a naive nostalgia that really, no one has anymore.
Lisa di Donato is a lens-based artist working in New York. Using photography as a material, tool, and language, she works across digital, analogue and manual processes such as hand rendering. Many of the resulting artworks have undergone interventions or translations to become something wholly different from their origin.
Architecture, landscape, anatomy, and artifacts of various natures are her primary sites of investigation. Depicted as being no longer, nor have they become something else, yet, they are part of a continuous artistic and existential process that manifests in unpredictable forms realized with a certain autonomy from any previously known thing. They and she operate in the in-betweenness of the two-dimensional and three-dimensional, light and lightless, the representational and nonrepresentational, and of limits and limitlessness. All of this attends to an ongoing fascination with the complexities of becoming, experience, perception and reality.
She studied Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts. She is a 2022 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Photography and a 2021 CFEVA Visual Artist Fellow finalist. Her work has been exhibited in the US, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and Germany. Most recently, she presented the multimedia site-specific installation Breathing Staircases with the artist group One&Seven at MEET Digital Culture Centre, Milano, 2022, and exhibited a public installation in The Makeable Mind, Noorderlicht Festival 2021 (NL). Her work has been featured in the Urbanautica (IT), Der Greif (DE) and New Observations (US) journals.
KEI ITO | BALTIMORE, MD
In the Abyss, 2022.
Unique C-print (Sunlight, Film),
Mounted on Aluminum Dibond, Laminated,
40 x 32 inches. Unique. $4500.
This recent series examines the supposed dichotomy between peace and conflict through the lens of personal identity and inherited trauma.
The first work, Teach Me How to Love This World, features dual projections which pair pronouns with nouns to produce a cycle of textual utterances such as “Your” “Blood”, “My” “Love”, and “Our” “Peace,” creating an endless thread of words that are both statements and questions. The projectors carry similar language, yet the wording creates tension between them, juxtaposing each other to further question the audience of where we have been, where we are right now, and where we are heading.
Kei Ito is a visual artist working primarily with camera-less photography and installation art who is currently teaching at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in NYC. Ito received his BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology followed by his MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art.
Ito’s work addresses issues of deep intergenerational loss and connections as he explores the materiality and experimental processes of photography. Ito’s work, fundamentally rooted in the trauma and legacy passed down from his late grandfather - a survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, meditates on the complexity of his identity and heritage through examining the past, current trajectories, and visualizing the invisible such as radiation, memory and life/death.
By excavating and uncovering hidden histories connected to his own, Ito utilizes his generational past to use as a case study for contemporary and future events. Many of Ito’s artworks transform both art and non-art spaces into temporal monuments that became platforms for the audience to explore social issues and the memorials dedicated to the losses suffered from the consequences of those issues. Within these intertwined pasts, Ito shines a light on power and its relationship to larger global issues that often led to and result in both war and peace alike.
Ito has participated in a number of Artist in Residence programs nationwide including the Santa Fe Art Institute (2023), the Studio at MASS MoCA(2021), the Denis Roussel Fellowship at the Center for Fine Art Photography (2021), and the Center for Photography at Woodstock (2019). His internationally recognized solo and group exhibitions can be read in reviews and articles published by the Washington Post, Hyperallergic, BmoreArt, ArtMaze Magazine, and BBC Culture & Art. His works are included in major institutional collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Norton Museum of Art, the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, and the Eskenazi Museum of Art.
JEREMY CHANDLER | NEW HAVEN, CT
Computer Ferns, 2020.
Archival Pigment Print, 20 x 25 inches.
Edition #1 of 6. $1600, Framed.
The landscape remains a central character within my imagery and is used as both stage and medium for communication. It serves as a point of meditation and conduit to express personal experience and memory. Working primarily in photography and short video pieces, my recent works are a poetic record connecting both my observations and performative gesture. Begun during a period of physical recovery and continued through the recent pandemic, the selected images were born out of experiences connected to healing, perception and longing. Through a process of collection and reflection, images taken at different times and places become interwoven in order to convey a more nuanced expression of personal experience.
Past works depict male figures embedded in a variety of terrain, engaged in moments of still introspection, seemingly in cryptic dialogue with one another and their environments. I stage photographs, activating landscapes that are already known to me, through the introduction of people, found and homemade props, lighting and cinematic methods of composition. Employing a visual language informed by my own memories and depictions of masculine identity through cinema, literature and art history, I repurpose methods utilized by hunting and military culture, converting otherwise weaponized techniques into benign aesthetic devices.
Through imagery that often subverts ritualized expressions of masculinity, Jeremy Chandler questions how notions of the sublime continue to shape a cultural relationship to wild spaces, while creating altered perceptions of space and place in the viewer’s imagination.
He has exhibited at notable national and international venues including: Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami FL, Hagedorn Foundation Gallery in Atlanta GA, Volta NY, The Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins Colorado, Balzer Art Projects in Basel Switzerland and Giampietro Gallery in New Haven CT. In 2008, he was awarded a major public art commission from the City of Tampa, FL and named the city’s Photographer Laureate.
Chandler was raised in northern Florida, earned my BFA from the University of Florida in Creative Photography and MFA from the University of South Florida in Studio Art. He currently lives in Wallingford Connecticut, where he is an Associate Professor, teaching photography at Southern Connecticut State University. When not teaching, he spends time between New England and Florida making photographs and films.
Chandler’s art practice has grown out of a desire to express my personal history; experiences, relationships, and identity through a prolonged engagement with place and a process that emphasizes shared experiences with those he photographs. He creates through a variety of approaches including portraiture, staged tableaus and documentary and narrative film projects. Throughout, futility, ritual, land use and methods of concealment are all recurring themes in his work. Chandler is interested in subverting ritualized expressions of masculinity and how history and folklore can often intertwine to create altered perceptions of space and place.
AUSTIN CULLEN | HOUSTON, TX
Floating Biomes, 2022.
Archival Inkjet Print, 24 x 18 inches.
Edition #2 of 15. $600, Framed.
A Natural History (Built to be Seen) catalogs the various ways the western natural world is presented and constructed within museums. As someone who grew up visiting natural history museums, I've always been fascinated by the extravagant ways museums framed the American landscape. Dramatic dioramas, interactive virtual experiences, and miniaturized landscapes all act as windows into the natural world. While this framing acts as a guide for reading and understanding nature, the same frame can be analyzed to understand the complex and ever-changing relationship between people and land.
Museums teach us about our environment, but often separate us from it. In an age of global climate crisis, it’s imperative to re-evaluate our understanding of nature. By creating images that subvert the viewer's ideas of what is natural or not, I’m asking the viewer to recognize how influential museum nature is on their understanding of the larger natural world.
Austin Cullen is a Houston based photographer and printmaker. He received his BFA from Stephen F. Austin State University in 2019, and his MFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2022. His current project explores museum natural displays and the natural world, and how they influence and affect one another. Austin's work has been included in numerous venues including the Houston Center for Photography, Filter Photo, and the Midwest Center for Photography.
TIELEN DING | NEW YORK, NY
Into the Wild, 2021.
Archival Pigment Print, 30 x 20 inches.
Edition #1 of 7 + 2AP. $2500, Framed.
Under the practice of aimless wandering in my daily life, I am interested in capturing and collecting found objects and materials in different size, shape, weight and volume, posing and composing them under different outdoor environment. In this photograph, which I also consider as documentation of site specific temporal installation, flags are trying to find their own unique forms, compositions and states of being.
Born in 1996 in Chongqing, China, Tielin Ding is a wanderer, observer and mixed media artist based in New York whose diverse practice involves working with playful objects, indeterminate traces and movements to create performative actions.
His application of “Mapping” and “Walking” gives him more opportunity to reflect on invisible systems within urban and natural spaces. Under the practice of way-finding, mark-making and game-changing, he has been very interested in drifting in the field of language and space, risking getting lost from point A to point B. He studied architecture engineering at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture for his bachelor and MFA in photography at Parsons School of Design, The New School in NYC. He has been showing his works recently at Silvermine Gallery in Connecticut, Garrison Art Center in New York, Noorderlicht International Photo Festival in Netherlands. Recent residency he attended includes Abbott Watts Photography Residency at Monson Arts in Maine, Nars Foundation Satellite Residency at Governors Island, Ellis-Beauregard Foundation residency in Maine. His first solo exhibition in New York will be presented at Nars Foundation in Brooklyn in July.
DOMINIQUE MUÑOZ | CHAPEL HILL, NC
Leather on Leather, February, 2021.
Archival Pigment Print, 28 x 24 inches.
Edition #1 of 5 + 2AP. $1950, Framed.
Mask, 2022.
Archival Pigment Print, 23 x 18 inches.
Edition #1 of 10 + 2AP. $1800, Framed.
MASK
My photographs are grounded in environments reminiscent of my childhood memories, supercharged with imagination. Places that fissure reality, allowing the spirituality of my ancestors to trickle through. I’m experimenting with esoteric, naturalistic rituals: the mysticism of my Mesoamerican ancestors.
Ixchel is the Mayan name for the moon, the goddess of medicine. Last spring, my grandma spent a week in the hospital recovering from severe abdominal pain. That same week, Ixchel came her closest to the earth; a supermoon. My grandma and I stood on her apartment balcony, gazing over the neighborhood pool and my childhood playground. When Ixchel reached her brightest, we draped our family’s emerald-green blanket over the handrail to begin our ritual. This blanket has been with our family for three generations, a symbol of Guatemala. My grandma rested her right hand on the plush threads and stood in silence, channeling the moonlight, rejuvenating her ability to resguardar.
Rituals like these are adaptations of traditions my grandma and great-grandma passed down. Making art with my family is how I engage in spirituality. With the use of artificial lights and color, I create imaginative environments, revealing the magical undercurrents of our world. The spiritual power of nature is foregrounded.
My photographs link my ancestor's indigenous and Brujeria customs to our modern-day spiritual practices, which have been cloaked in the facade of catholicism. By celebrating and reimagining the stories of my ancestors, I am creating integrated forms of spirituality, reinforcing our spiritual connection to the earth.
AEROCHROME WORLD
Aerochrome World contains landscapes photographed all over North America. Digitally processed to emulate Kodak’s Aerochrome film. I used this method to create a world saturated in crimson while obscuring its original location. I am creating surreal landscapes in familiar feeling places. Aerochrome was mainly developed as a US military weapon to reveal enemies camouflaged in the jungle. This film is now discontinued.
Dominique Muñoz is a Guatemalan American artist. He received his BFA in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University. In 2016, he became Clark Construction’s first Photographer-in-Residence. This experience presented him with his first solo exhibition at the National Building Museum. Shortly after, Dominique worked for Framebridge for three years as their In-house photographer, setting a visual brand identity rooted in authenticity and nostalgia. He now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina as a freelance photographer.