ACQUISITIONS & HONORARIUMS: UnBound14!
2025 CANDELA COLLECTION ACQUISITIONS
UnBound14!
With money raised from this year’s fundraising efforts, we were able to collect a record number of works to add to the Candela Collection. Thanks to all who gave, partied, and supported from afar.
A special thanks to our UnBound14! party sponsors:
Jim Klaus
Karen Kelly
VCUarts & ICA
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
…and thank you to Unbound14! artist and 2025 Candela solo feature, Mejung Park, for her generous sponsorship toward the first 2025 honorariums!
2025 HONORARIUMS:
In addition to this year’s acquisitions, artists Kyohei Abe and Donna Soo are the first recipients of UnBound! honorariums to fund 2026 exhibitions. Both Abe and Soo will have solo features in Candela’s 2026 programming calendar.
KYOHEI ABE | BALTIMORE, MD
KYOHEI ABE is a contemporary artist who works with a combination of collage and digital manipulation, exploring themes of visual disassociation and metaphoric play. Through his art, Abe invites viewers to look beyond mere representation, encouraging a deeper engagement with the images and their influence on contemporary perception.
His work has been showcased in numerous solo and group exhibitions across the United States and internationally. Notable solo exhibitions include Imaginary Scapes at Jason Shin Gallery, Redacted at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and Einfach Schoni at Uno Art Space in Stuttgart, Germany. Most recently, his works were featured in the exhibition The Collector’s Eye | Creatives and Collectors at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA.
Abe’s artworks are held in the collections of prominent institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, TX, and the West Collection in Oak, PA. His work has also been highlighted in several publications, including The Collector's Eye: A Photographer's View of His Contemporaries by Schilt Publishing, A Myriad Possibilities by Album Edition in Germany, Bleek Magazine in Moscow, Russia, and Luz Photographic Journal in New York City.
CODY BRATT | SAN FRANCISCO, CA
The Other Stories explores intergenerational violence and the possibility of healing through Bratt’s family archives – two families where these issues are particularly prevalent – and original photographs. Images are printed or reproduced from negatives and transformed by hand using collage, pencil, acrylic, sandpaper, and other materials to create layered, tactile interventions.
CODY BRATT (b. 1982) is a San Francisco-born and based artist. His father, a photoengraver, and his mother, a multimedia artist, inspired his love of photography and book making, in particular. He holds a BA in Rhetoric with a formal concentration in Narrative and Image from the University of California, Berkeley (2005). Shying away from a literal approach, Cody’s photography employs primarily non-linear emotional or psychological approaches to exploring subjects and concepts. Unreliable memories, displacement, loss and coming of age feature centrally in Cody’s work.
He has exhibited solo at Filter Space Chicago and Griffin Museum of Photography and internationally in groups at Athens Photo Festival, Berlin Art Week, Month of Photography Los Angeles, Colorado Photographic Arts Center, ICP Museum, Brighton Photo Fringe amongst others. Cody’s most recent series, THE OTHER STORIES, was honored with a 2022 Chico Review Merit Scholarship, 2020 CENTER Awards Director’s Choice Award and a 2020 Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 distinction. Cody’s first monograph, LOVE WE LEAVE BEHIND, debuted by Fraction Editions in 2018. That series was awarded a 2018 Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 distinction and was named as a finalist for the 2016 Duke University CDS/Honickman First Book Prize.
His work is in public and private collections in several states across the US, as well as Europe. Cody’s work has been published worldwide in print and online venues including PDN, LENSCRATCH, LensCulture, Lomography Magazine, iGNANT, Gente Di Fotografia, Blur Magazine, Aint-Bad, and Float Magazine amongst others.
ZACH CLARK [NATIONAL MONUMENT PRESS] | OAKLAND, CA
Dodeca Meters is a year-long publishing project featuring 12 booklets by 12 photographers, printed in a single color using risograph printing. Dodeca Meters exists to provide an archive of what is possible within the intersection of photography and risograph printing, through accessible multiples.
Dodeca Meters features the work of Sara J. Winston, tamara suarez porras, Anna Rotty, Ebti, Jamie Robertson, Makenzie Goodman, Saskia Kahn, Nicole White, Arielle Rebek, Kareem Worrell, Lindsay Buchman, & Nelson Chan.
ZACH CLARK is an Oakland, CA based artist, educator, and publisher. He received his BFA from University of Illinois Chicago, and MFA from University of California Davis. His work is rooted in locational memory and is based in the intersection of printmaking, photography, and publication. He publishes as National Monument Press, a publishing project focused on supporting uniquely American stories through small edition printed matter and curatorial projects, completed largely through collaboration with other artists. He is one half of Chute Studio, an Oakland based Risograph publishing studio. He is a lecturer at California State University East Bay, and has shown, worked, taught, and is in collections across North America, Europe, and Japan.
MATT EICH | CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA
The Invisible Yoke Boxed Set is a rayon-covered foil-stamped limited-edition custom slipcase handmade by Eliot Dudik Studios in Richmond, Virginia. It is a container for four monographs released between 2016-2024 by photographer Matt Eich and Swiss atelier, Sturm & Drang.
MATT EICH is a photographic essayist working on long-form projects related to memory, family, community, and the American condition. He is the author of five monographs of photography and his work is widely exhibited and held in public collections including the Chrysler Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Portland Art Museum and others. Matt’s projects have received support from an Aaron Siskind Fellowship, two Getty Images Grants, two VMFA Professional Fellowships and an Aperture/Google Creators Lab Photo Fund Grant. He was an artist in residence at Light Work in 2013 and at a Robert Rauschenberg Residency in 2019. Eich teaches at Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at the George Washington University, makes books under the imprint Little Oak.PRESS and resides in Virginia with his family.
FRANCISCO GONZALEZ CAMACHO | HELSINKI, FINLAND
Elsewhere takes an introspective dive into the artist's immigrating journey to Finland, and the feelings of isolation consequently involved, using the landscape as a tool for emotional catharsis. He presents a space for contemplation, interwinding elements of poetic narration, infrared photography and references to Pictorialism.
It reflects upon the deeper material connection between landscape and image-making through an exploration of traditional printing techniques like photopolymer etching and the use of handmade Japanese paper.
FRANCISCO GONZALEZ CAMACHO (b. 1990) is a Spanish visual artist based in Helsinki. He holds a BA in Documentary Photography at the University of South Wales (UK), currently studying a Masters' degree in Photography at Aalto University (FI). Gonzalez Camacho's work presents a process-based approach interweaving photography and graphic printing methods.
His practice is a result of intuitive exploration centered around themes such as materiality, immigration and the connectedness between landscape and self. He has been exhibited internationally including The Finnish Museum of Photography (FI), The Center for Photographic Art (US), The Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts (JP) and featured in publications such as Der Greif, Booooooom, C41 magazine and GUP magazine among others. He was awarded a photobook award by Booooooom back in 2022 and selected as a finalist for the Carte Blanche students by Paris Photo in 2023. He is part of the permanent collection of The Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts (JP), The Museum of Avant-Garde (CH) and The Amedeo Modigliani Foundation (IT).
AMANDA MARCHAND & LEAH SOBSEY | BROOKLYN, NY / GREENSBORO, NC
THIS EARTHEN DOOR:
Emily Dickinson (b. 1830) is a time-honored darling of American poetry, famous for her unconventional verse punctuated by dashes and spaces. Though she made no secret of her poetry, only a handful of poems were published in her lifetime – she was better known for her green thumb. She could coax any lost plant back to life, often gifting bouquets to friends and neighbors with a poem or some words tucked inside.
THIS EARTHEN DOOR is a photographic re-working of her herbarium, started around the age of 14. Dickinson’s herbarium holds 424 species of plant collected on walks or grown in her garden in Amherst, Massachusetts, with a few gifted from faraway places. These pressed plants are housed inside a forest green cover patterned with leaves and flowers, with HERBARIUM embossed on the spine in gold. Herbaria were popular in Dickinson’s era – a type of flower scrapbook made by affixing plant specimens into the book’s pages, annotated by hand. A young Emily writes to a friend, “Have you made an herbarium yet? I hope you will if you have not, it would be such a treasure to you; ‘most all the girls are making one.”
In a gesture honoring Dickinson’s effort made nearly 200 years ago, and galvanized by the fact that her herbarium is now too delicate for viewing, we grew and harvested plants from our gardens to remake her sampler with an early photographic process known as an anthotype. “Antho” comes from the Greek, meaning “flower.” Anthotypes are plant-based photographs. Ours are made by applying a plant’s colorful juices to the surface of paper, then exposing the paper to the sun – with a photographic negative on top. The sun’s rays have both a chemical and bleaching effect, leaving a shadow imprint on paper, a camera-less sun-print. The anthotype process is a non-toxic, eco-friendly, alternative photo process. The plants can be composted afterwards, and anthotypes do not require harsh chemicals, as do most photography processes.
With its careful study of plants, a Victorian herbarium was an introduction to botany, a backdoor to the study of science not permitted women. A few miles away from the Dickinson homestead, a 16-year-old Emily went on to study botany at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, one of the most rigorous schools for women at the time. Her passion for nature and plants extends to her writing, calling her poems blossoms of the brain. More than a third of her poems and half her letters reference flowers or plants.
Somewhere, between flower and friend, ours has been a collaboration – of poetry and science, gardens and light, encompassing more than three years of making. It was born during the Pandemic while sheltering at home with our families, having withdrawn like the reclusive Emily at her bedroom writing desk. This project transcends place (with one of us travelling between Quebec and New York – and the other in North Carolina). It marries science and art, partnering with botanists, Dr. Kyra Krakos (and students), professor at Maryville University, and Peter Grima, botanist and Dickinson herbarium scholar in Western Massachusets – in a second research portion of the project that followed.
The title for THIS EARTHEN DOOR is taken from poem Fr845. This poem alludes to Dickinson’s own garden, a door to earthen delights, as well as a door to mortality/ immorality.
We can but follow to the Sun –
As oft as He go down
He leaves Ourselves a Sphere behind –
‘Tis mostly – following –
We go no further with the Dust
Than to the Earthen Door –
And then the Panels are reversed –
And we behold – no more.
Here, as in our work, the Sun is a compass, a vital presence, a constant reminder of time – the cycle of day, of season… leaving something intangibly luminous behind – sunset, spirit, body, the shimmering of a photograph.
AMANDA MARCHAND is a Canadian artist and educator living in New York. Her work focuses on the natural world with an experimental approach to photography. Recent honors include the 2024 Lensculture Awards winner; the 2024 London Photography Awards; the 2023 Julia Margaret Cameron Photography Awards; the 2022 Silver List (Silver Eye Center for Photography and Carnegie Mellon); Medium Photo Festival’s Second Sight Award Winner, 2021; Photo Lucida’s Critical Mass Top 50, 2021. She has held fellowships at the Hermitage Artist Retreat, MacDowell Colony, Mass MoCA, and Headlands Center for the Arts, among others.
Marchand’s work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group shows. “This Earthen Door” premiered at Photofairs NYC 2023, was exhibited at the Stephen and Peter Sachs Museum, and will be on view at the Brandywine Museum of Art, 2025. Marchand has published three monographs with Datz Press, “This Earthen Door: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium,” (2024); "Nothing Will Ever be the Same Again" (2019); and "Night Garden" (2015). She has published several artist books including, "The World is Astonishing with You in it: A 21st Century Field Guide to the Birds, Ferns and Wildflowers," (2022). Her work is collected internationally in private and public collections such as, The Getty Research Institute, Stanford University Library, San Jose Museum of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Her work has been reviewed in The Marginalian, Lenscratch, Lensculutre, and ARTnews. “This Earthen Door” is represented by Rick Wester Fine Art. Marchand is representated by Traywick Contemporary, Rick Wester Fine Art, and photo-eye Gallery’s Showcase.
LEAH SOBSEY is an artist, Associate Professor of Photography, Curator, and Director of the Gatewood Gallery at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her multidisciplinary photographic practice reaches into the fields of nature and science, design, installation, and textile.
Recent exhibitions include Paris Photo, the Huntington Museum CA, Datz Press Seoul Korea, The Sachs Museum St Louis, The Harvard Museum of Natural History, with forthcoming solo exhibitions in 2025 at the Brandywine Museum of Art, AIPAD NYC, Rick Wester Fine Art NYC, the Gregg Museum and National Chengchi University, Taipei.
Her books include This Earthen Door- Datz Press, 2024. Collections: Birds Bones and Butterflies, 2016, and Bull City Summer, 2013.
Sobsey has exhibited internationally, and her photographs and books are held in private and public collections across the US, including the Huntington Library, North Carolina Museum of Art, Credit Suisse, Cassilhaus Collection, Duke University Hospital, Fidelity Investments, Microsoft Collection. She has participated in numerous artist residencies, including the Virginia Center for the Arts, Dumbarton Oaks, Penland, The National Park system, Hambidge, and Habla Mexico. Her work has been published in Artnews, New Yorker.com, the Paris Review Daily, Slate.com, Hyperallergic.com, The Telegraph, The Marginalian, and Audubon. “This Earthen Door” is represented by Rick Wester Fine Art, NYC.
JORDAN MARTY | RICHMOND, VA
In Marty's work, abandoned, forgotten, or insignificant darkroom prints are sourced and materially transformed into new sheets of paper and charcoal powder. These materials are then used to create new works — primarily “expanded” photographs that function as screens to filter ambient sound and prepared audio compositions.
These silver gelatin prints are shredded, pulped, and reformed into handmade paper, or "cooked" into charcoal. The charcoal is then ground into powder and added to the paper to achieve deep black tones.
The handmade paper is further modified with a laser engraver to create speaker grills for a DIY stereo amplifier. These speaker grills are used to emit audio compositions derived from field recordings and other sonic ephemera. The process also includes documenting the charcoal sheets with macro photographs and printing large format negatives as silver gelatin photographs. Waste from the printing process is recycled back into future paper and charcoal, creating a semi-circular practice.
JORDAN MARTY was born in Melbourne, FL in 1985. He received a BFA in Photography from the Savannah College of Art & Design in 2008 and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Florida in 2013. His art practice explores the mediums of images, object-making, and sound in the pursuit of developing a semi-circular photography practice. At the core of this practice is the use of analog photographic materials which harness a physical trace of the space and time in which they were originally created. He currently lives in Richmond, VA and serves as an Assistant Professor within the Art Foundation program at VCUarts.
ADRIENNE MOUMIN | NEW YORK, NY • SILVER SPRING, MD
Moumin's handmade photo collages are part of an ongoing series begun in 2000, combining her lifelong involvement with both silver-based photography and collage as distinctly separate practices. In this series, black and white film photographs of New York City architectural elements are combined with handwork. Multiple gelatin silver prints of the same image are made, which are then hand-cut and assembled into 2-D and 3-D geometric abstract collages.
ADRIENNE MOUMIN (b. 1961, Brooklyn, NY) graduated from SUNY Empire State College in 1999 with a BA in Documentary Visual Studies and Society. She works primarily in hand-printed B&W photography, and handmade photo and mixed media collage. Moumin is best known for her Architextures photo collage series, inspired by New York architecture and urban landscapes, ongoing since 2000. Moumin is based in New York, NY and Silver Spring, MD. Her most recent solo exhibit was reviewed in 2024 in The Washington Post and Washington, DC City Paper. She was awarded 2023, 2021 and 2016 Individual Artist Grants by the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County (MD), for the creation of large-scale photo collages, as well as 2022 and 2021 grants from the Maryland State Arts Council. Moumin’s work is in public and private collections throughout the US and Europe. In 2020, her photographic work was translated into a walk-in public art installation in Wheaton, Maryland.
RACHEL PHILLIPS | SAN FRANCISCO BAY
The series Not a Cloud in the Sky begins with archival pigment print with hand-applied pearlescent acrylic paint. Images of clouds and nature come from a database I am building of street view mapping software screenshots taken around the data centers powering cloud computing and AI; the terrestrial reality of the World Wide Web.
*Interestingly for Candela, Virginia is an epicenter for data centers, including top secret data centers powering federal surveillance and military operation. Though both governments and corporations are secretive about their locations, date center warehouses are difficult to hide, and I have been able to find them using third-party directories, Wikileaks documents and satellite views.
Each photographic image is overprinted with a unique monoprint made outdoors with non-toxic ink directly from abandoned spiderwebs, a combination of natural and artificial systems strangely unified by a shared language. "The web” and “the cloud” suggest familiar, organic, sustaining systems from the world around us… a far cry from reality.
In the work, I am processing the tension I feel between the grave social and environmental cost of AI and expansive cloud computing, especially in our current political climate, (witness: the security breach of military operations this week), while also admitting to the obvious power, and even magic, within this expanding web of technology that is enveloping—and entrapping—us every day.
RACHEL PHILLIPS began photography while completing her undergraduate degree at Skidmore College, graduating in 2005. In numerous group and solo exhibitions she has presented a series of projects exploring the photograph as object, often resulting in unique works incorporating a specialized transfer printing technique as well as other processes like encaustic wax and materials ranging from old envelopes to 19th century cabinet cards. A frequent theme in the work is a desire to “reanimate” the vernacular photographs and paper ephemera in her collection by reworking them in a variety of ways to create imagery that is resonant with the past yet has a new vitality and reflection of our own time and perspective.
In addition to photography, Rachel works in the San Francisco Bay Area as a tutor for children with learning differences, and served as the Executive Director of the community-based nonprofit PhotoAlliance from 2022-2024.
ANDREAS RENTSCH | HUNTINGTON, NY
A few months ago, I cleaned up my studio and discovered several boxes of discarded 4x5” Polaroid Type 55 prints from my Entangled with Justice series, which I worked on from 2005 to 2010. The now-discontinued Polaroid Type 55 film produced a high-quality black-and-white negative along with a positive print, both of which were processed simultaneously within 30 seconds of being removed from the film holder. Instead of fixing the print and negative immediately, I allowed both to continue processing for weeks, months, or even years. In most cases, the positive prints became unusable as the ongoing chemical reactions often obscured the images. However, I sepia-toned the black-and-white negatives, and the impurities that developed over time resulted in fascinating and unique images. This series has been featured in over 13 museum exhibitions, including a solo show at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, and was also part of The Polaroid Project, a retrospective showcasing artists who used Polaroid films in their work.
The Polaroid Project was exhibited in nine museums across three continents. While sorting through the rediscovered boxes of Polaroid prints, I found many images with new potential for a series, if I could find a way to reveal the figures again. By using a brush and black paint to trace within the lines originally drawn with a flashlight and captured with a 4x5” camera, the figures slowly came back to life.
My upbringing had a huge influence on who I am as an artist today. Growing up on a prison compound where my father was the warden, daily interactions with prisoners were common. My father was a firm believer in rehabilitation and the importance of treating every person with respect and dignity, regardless of their crimes. We often had prisoners join us at our family dinner table. When I was 11 years old, I played soccer with them regularly. One inmate, Teitei, became so close to our family that after his release, having no family of his own, we invited him every year to join us for a week of vacation. Memories of time spent in that environment resurfaced vividly after seeing the harrowing images in 2004 of the abuse, humiliation, and torture of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison. As Americans, we were supposed to be the liberators, rescuing Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. Yet, these servicemen had become indistinguishable from the very tormentors typically found in secret and oppressive prison environments. While it may seem unfair to compare these two vastly different settings, Abu Ghraib prison and the penitentiary where I grew up, the disturbing images nonetheless triggered my own memories of growing up inside a prison and relating to individuals whom society solely defined as criminals. Deeply disturbed and personally affected by the Abu Ghraib images, I felt compelled to begin my Entangled with Justice series, which launched a long and introspective exploration into how fate, geography, and politics influence the administration of justice. It confirmed my suspicion that external forces such as race, political climate, and the public’s demand for convictions often override the pursuit of truth and the fair application of justice.
As I look at the newly discovered images, I wonder if they hold the same impact and significance as the original Entangled with Justice series. One thing I know for certain: all my work is anchored in a moral sensibility that relates to my upbringing. These visual and real-life experiences nurtured a sense of empathy in me for the human condition that has been a guiding force in my life as well as my work.
ANDREAS RENTSCH received a B.F.A. from Les Ecoles d’Arts Appliqués in Vevey, Switzerland, and an M.F.A. in Studio Art from Stony Brook University. He spent the first 18 years of his life on a prison compound where his father was the warden and where daily interactions with convicts were common. These visual and real-life experiences nurtured a sense of empathy in him for the human condition that has been a guiding force in his life as well as his work.
Rentsch’s work has been exhibited worldwide, including a solo exhibition at the Musée de l’Elysée in Switzerland. His images are in many museum collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, the Musée de l’Elysée in Switzerland, the Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi, Belgium, the Museet for Fotokunst in Odense, Denmark, the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, NY, the Swiss Foundation of Photography, and the Polaroid Collection. He is a recipient of two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships and two grants from the Polaroid Corporation. The photography magazine Aperture published one of his portfolios.
Additionally, numerous books and magazines have published his work, including “The Polaroid Project”, a book published as part of a world-wide nine-museum exhibition of artists who have used Polaroid film in their work. He taught at the International Center of Photography, Stony Brook University, and St. John's University. He is currently an Associate Professor of Photography at Lycoming College and the Chair of the Art Department.
DONNA SOO | AUSTIN, TX
I create sculptures and arrange them in tableaus, which I then photograph. I am interested in contrasting natural forms and the music they stimulate for me in the context of our manufactured environment. I draw from my background in sculpture to create subjects in various materials, primarily from fired clay – which contain minerals same as those found in rocks and fossils. Rocks, fossils and the plant life trapped inside them inspire in me to reflect in photographic form how I feel holding them in my hand, for the ones I own, or holding others in my mind as jumping off points to contrast the span of my life to the deep time visible in them. For the radio series project, I photograph sculptures I make in response to how the rocks, fossils and landscapes reverberate for me through synesthesia. My experience of synesthesia allows me to interpret novel sounds as shapes. I am stimulated by the sounds of certain landscapes, in particular the ancient seas, volcanic formations and erosion of Far West Texas desert landscapes which I interpret as radio forms in the photo series.
DONNA SOO (b.1964, Queens, NY) received a BFA in sculpture from the University of Texas at El Paso in 1991 and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1993, also in sculpture. She seeks to contrast the contemporary world with the deep time visible in rocks and fossils. Donna lives in Austin, Texas and is a student at the Austin Community College studying fine art photography. She recently participated in an artist residency at the Willow House in Terlingua, Texas, in July of 2023. Terlingua and the Far West Texas geologic landscape are an inspiration because of the deep time story of ancient shallow seas, volcanic activity and erosion.
RAYMOND THOMPSON JR | AUSTIN, TX
High Water - Bottomlands - Lincoln City
The Neuse River flows from the capital of North Carolina, serpentining through tobacco and cotton fields to Eastern Carolina swamps before emptying into the Atlantic Ocean. Occasionally, the river overflows with rainwater and reclaims the landscape, paying no attention to the man-made borders. This can only lead to tragedy for vulnerable communities abandoned by institutions meant to protect them.
The small town of Kinston, North Carolina suffered a natural disaster that author Jake Bittle says is part of a trend he has coined “the great displacement,” which will spark the next great migration fleeing the impacts of climate change. In Kinston, this natural disaster caused the relocation of 800 families representing 10 percent of the community. The historic community founded by freed slaves and sharecroppers was called Lincoln City and was situated in the bottomlands in the Neuse’s floodplain that sat several feet below sea level.
Discriminatory housing practices forced people to locate near the river, which made it vulnerable to periodic flooding. In what the federal government called “coordinated climate migration,” the community was bought out home by home and finally razed to the ground.
All that is left is a maze of streets and the curbs marking where a driveway used to be.
This photography project examines what remains in the landscape of Lincoln City today. The images are created using the Lumen printing and submerged in water until the emulsion dissolves and/or mold forms on the surface.
RAYMOND THOMPSON JR is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and visual journalist, based in Austin, TX. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His academic journey includes an MFA in Photography from West Virginia University, an MA in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, and a degree in American Studies from the University of Mary Washington. Thompson explores how race, memory, representation, and place combine to shape the Black environmental imagination of the North American landscape.
He won the 1619 Aftermath Grant (2023) and the 2021 Lenscatch Student Prize(2021). He has been exhibited in numerous exhibitions, including the Fotofest Biennial - Ten by Ten: Ten Portfolios from the Meeting Place 2022-23( 2024). His work is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Thompson is the author of Appalachian Ghost, published in 2024 by the University Press of Kentucky.
Thompson’s professional experience extends to freelance photography, where he has collaborated with renowned organizations such as The New York Times, The Intercept, NBC News, NPR, Politico, ProPublica, The Nature Conservancy, ACLU, WBEZ, Google, Merrell, Bloomberg Businessweek Magazine, and the Associated Press.
VAUNE TRACHTMAN | BATTLEBORO, VT
Trachtman’s latest photogravures in ALL THAT IS blend imagery with her parents’ handwriting. They died when she was young, and the marks they left behind, when viewed with her Dyslexia, remind her of the tension one feels when recognizing language but struggling to comprehend it. Memory can work the same way—though we may reach into the past, we can never fully grasp it.
VAUNE TRACHTMAN is a photographer and printmaker whose images explore the evanescence of dreams and memory. Using the photopolymer gravure method, she creates works that "seem more like emanations than photographs" (Mark Feeney, Boston Globe), while her attentiveness to the "transitory reach of light" leads to moments of "fleeting, wondrous, sacred habitation" (Collier Brown, Od Review).
Vaune is included in the top 50 of Photolucida's Critical Mass, and she has been a semifinalist in the Print Center's 95th and 97th ANNUAL International Competitions. She was a finalist and People's Choice Award Winner in Klompching Gallery's FRESH ANNUAL. Her series NOW IS ALWAYS received solo exhibitions at the Griffin Museum of Photography and the Vermont Center for Photography, von Aeurspurg Gallery, and was named a Top Portfolio by Rfotofolio and an Outstanding Work by the Denis Roussel Awards. She has been shortlisted for the international Hariban Award, and was a winner of the Alternative Processes National Competition. Vaune is a recipient of grants from the Adolf & Esther Gottlieb Foundation, the Berkshire Taconic Foundation, and the Vermont Arts Council and NEA. Vaune received her M.A. from New York University and the International Center of Photography. She lives in Brattleboro, Vermont.
THE CANDELA COLLECTION
HOW DO WE CHOOSE WHAT GOES INTO THE COLLECTION?
When selecting works for the Collection, we're asking ourselves several questions:
What does this piece bring to the conversation of the larger collection?
Just as we ask this question when jurying the exhibition, we’re looking at twelve previous years of acquisitions and hoping to add works that broaden the conversation of the collection. What process is being used? What concepts are being addressed? Who is making the work? Where are they from?
How was this piece received during the exhibition?
We like to note pieces that were real conversation starters or favorites from visitors during the exhibition and consider them in the selection process.
What is the initial cost of collecting this piece?
This is one of the more practical questions when it comes to collecting from UnBound!. Pieces can typically range from a couple hundred dollars to tens of thousands, so we weigh our cost of collection when considering how far we want our raised dollars to go.
How is the object?
How is the printing/construction? Is the piece framed thoughtfully, and did it arrive well cared for? Does it appear as good, if not better, than represented in submissions? Is it signed or does it include a certificate of authenticity? Final objects are important, so they are largely what we consider when thinking about the collection.
What additional costs need to be considered?
How does this work need to be prepared for longer term storage and archival presentation? Due to the nature of this show being more accessible, many people are working within small budgets, or have less experience working in gallery settings. When we’re looking at works for the Collection, we’re asking what additional costs are going to be needed to get a piece reframed, mounted, or reglazed to best ensure its longevity. Take into account the size of the piece, and those costs could be nearly as much as the piece itself. Works that minimize these additional costs are much easier to consider.
How does this piece represent the work of the artist?
We love collecting pieces from artists that feel representative of their work in the moment. This is certainly not a dealbreaker question, but it adds significance to collect a defining piece from a particular artist.
These questions are conceptual, practical, and emotional, which creates a bit of a puzzle when landing on the final pieces.