UnBound14! Artist Features: I
KYOHEI ABE • JAKE BENZINGER • CODY BRATT • ANNIE BRIARD • CHLOE BROVER • MATT CALARCO • ANTHONY CARR
UNBOUND14!
June 27 – August 9
Join us for a breakdown of our annual juried + invitational photography exhibition. Throughout the exhibition, we’ll share information about our artists and the processes behind their featured pieces.
SUPPORT THE EXHIBITION:
UnBound! is our annual juried photography show which directly supports artists in the exhibition through sales and fundraising efforts. 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 the permanent collection of a notable arts institution. This year, Candela excited to offer an honorarium + 2026 exhibition to 1-2 UnBound14! artists with funds raised over the course of the exhibition.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 2ND, 7-11PM:
THE ANNUAL FUNDRAISING GALA.
This year’s theme is A Midsummer Night’s Fever Dream, which you can learn more about here.
KYOHEI ABE | BALTIMORE, MD
Opus 21, 2024
Mixed Media,
16 x 20 Framed
Unique
$2,800
Abe creates images that are built upon a foundation of playful metaphor and intentional disassociation, weaving together visual elements in a way that challenges conventional interpretation. By juxtaposing seemingly unrelated imagery, altering contexts, and disrupting expected visual narratives, his work invites viewers to engage with each piece on a more intuitive and subliminal. This approach fosters a sense of ambiguity, where meaning is not fixed but instead emerges through the viewer’s own associations, emotions, and experiences. Through this process, Abe aims to create compositions that exist in a liminal space, between recognition and abstraction— familiarity and strangeness, encouraging a deeper exploration of how images function beyond their literal representation.
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.
JAKE BENZINGER | ROCKLAND, ME
Like Dust Settling in a Dim-Lit Room (Or Starless Forest), 2023.
Photo Book,
7.75 x 6 x 0.25 inches
2nd Edition of 50
$50
Jake Benzinger’s father often told folk tales and stories, which used fear to shape the artists views from an early age. He would pretend to transform into various beasts and monsters, raising his lip to reveal wolf-like canines. Overcome by a primal aggression, he would grasp his face in agony, but just before losing control he would catch himself, always promising that the next time may not be the same.
Juxtaposed against the artist’s father’s attempts to disguise theatrical, fear-evoking stories as lessons of morality were his teachings informed by Native American spirituality and culture. Jake was raised in an animistic household and was taught the sacredness of the land. We engaged in ritual, giving thanks to all forms of life. Together, this created my sense of self and identity.
As an adult, Jake learned that his father was deceived. Jake’s father had little true connection to his parents, but after his father’s passing, he discovered a photograph of him dressed in full Native American regalia. Mistaking this image as evidence of having Native American lineage, he became enveloped in this false heritage. He pursued an understanding of the culture, wrongly making it his own.
"After the Embers Burn and Die" explores identity built upon false truths and a lineage of self-created mythos. Benzinger uses photography as a medium to create narratives and explore a world between fiction and reality, investigating themes of mysticism, animism, and death. Through image-making, Jake engages with the duality of my father’s stories, exploring how storytelling and photographs hold the power to construct one’s identity and understanding of the world around them.
Jake Benzinger (he/him) is a photographer, book artist, and writer based in Rockland, Maine; he received his BFA in photography from Lesley University, College of Art and Design in Cambridge, MA. His work explores self-created mythos, weaving together imagery to navigate the space between fiction and reality—investigating themes of identity, mysticism, animism, and death.
His work has been shown nationally and internationally in solo and group exhibitions at the Griffin Museum of Photography, Haute Photographie Rotterdam, Center for Fine Art Photography, Glasgow Gallery of Photography, 82Parris, Panopticon Gallery, RIT City Space Gallery, and more. He has been featured by numerous platforms including GUP Magazine, Lensculture, Float Magazine, Lenscratch, Transference Magazine, and Fraction Magazine. His publications are held in collections at the National Gallery of Art, School of Visual Arts, SMFA at Tufts, and Griffin Museum of Photography, and his monograph, Like Dust Settling in a Dim-Lit Room (Or Starless Forest), was shortlisted for the 2023 Lucie Photobook Prize.
Jake is currently the assistant gallery manager, associate curator of photography, and curator of books at Blue Raven Gallery, a content editor for Lenscratch, and the founder/director of wych elm, an independent press creating small-run photo books, zines, and fine art ephemera.
CODY BRATT | SAN FRANCISCO, CA
The Blessed Child, 2020.
Pigment print on Japanese kozo paper with acrylic paint,
20 x 14 inches framed.
Unique.
$1,600 framed
The Other Stories Statement
The stories in this series pick up with two men — my paternal great-grandfather and my maternal grandfather. Of course, the stories neither began nor ended with them exclusively.
The stories they would have you remember are about legacy. Their stories were about publishing poetry in 1950s San Francisco, documenting labor rights movements, being a celebrated school superintendent, and fighting the good wars. Their sons and daughters, although particularly their sons, might have you solely remember these stories, too.
But, then there are The Other Stories:
... about a grandfather molesting his granddaughter,
... about a wife complicit in her husband’s fondness for young girls,
... about a husband lighting his wife’s hair on fire,
... about a son left in the car while his parents drink at the bar,
... about a ninety year old man attempting to choke his adult daughter.
These are the stories no one wants to remember about the cycles of physical violence, substance abuse and mental health disorders passed down from one generation to the next like a virus.
This series concerns itself with the interrogation of intergenerational violence and whether healing is truly possible using the archives of two families for which these issues are particularly pronounced in addition to photographs made specifically for this project. Prints are pulled directly from the archives or reproduced from negatives using a variety of processes and then worked by hand using collage, pencil, acrylic, sandpaper, and other manual interventions. The final installed is a mix of both pieces framed under optium and raw pieces mounted directly to the wall.
The work presupposes that all families contain some form of this unanswerable riddle — whether you know it or not, whether you are willing to look or not.
This story is about sunlight being the best disinfectant.
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.
ANNIE BRIARD | VANCOUVER, BC
Through Walls of Gold, 2024.
Archival pigment print,
24 x 16 inches, framed.
Edition #AP1 of 3 + 2AP.
$3,800 framed.
Rooted in conceptual photography, analog technologies and Light and Space, this series, Through the Walls of Gold, asks us to reconsider the workings of visual perception and how it shapes our surrounding existence. By complicating what is seen, Briard constructs dreamlike landscapes that transcend the appearance of the physical world into imaginative realms while reflecting back visual phenomenology.
Deeply affected by the unique light qualities of California’s High Desert, she has been making regular trips to this environment over the past decade. Briard forges an ethereal atmosphere that captures the area’s sublime allure, once depicted by visionaries like Agnes Pelton, a member of the Transcendental Painting Group. The open terrain’s natural, muted beauty is optically distorted and reimagined through an acidic palette and otherworldly perspective.
Her photographs are created using handmade lenses formed from discarded military prisms to deconstruct the visible spectrum into its recalibrated colors. Minimalist translucent “lenses”, referencing Larry Bell, Peter Alexander or Alex Israel, introduce an interactive experience transforming each image as the viewer moves around the gallery.
When asked to contextualize these works, the artist states “my practice uses the landscape genre as a foil through which to discuss issues in vision psychology, neuroscience and existential philosophy.”
Briard reminds us that seeing is a process that presents a version of reality rather than an accurate reproduction and that perception is constantly evolving, shaped by context and individual experience.
— text from Royale Projects, Los Angeles
Annie Briard (BFA, MFA) is a Canadian artist known for her practice in expanded photography and digital media. With beginnings in Montreal and now working from the Pacific North-West, her works connect aesthetics steeped in affect theory, photo conceptualism, and the light and space movement rooted in California. Triangulating between these interdisciplinary modalities, her artworks evidence a dialogue with each movement’s key concerns. Through moving images, media installations, expanded and print photography, Briard challenges how we make sense of the world and of each other through visual perception, emphasizing paradigms across the fields of ecology, psychology and neuroscience.
Briard’s works have been presented in numerous solo exhibitions, including at Royale Projects in Los Angeles (2024), “Staring at the Sun” at the Quebec Biennale (2022), “Superlucent” (2022) at Monica Reyes Gallery and “Within the Eclipse” (2021) at the Burrard Arts Foundation, in Vancouver; "Second Sight” at AC Institute in New York (2019), and Joyce Yahouda Gallery in Montréal, as well as group shows, festivals and fairs internationally at the Three Shadows Photography Centre (Beijing), the Lincoln Film Centre (New York), Matadero Madrid, the Switzerland Architecture Museum (Basel), among many others. Recently, she presented monumental scale public art projects for a number of commissions in Canada including for the Vancouver Art Gallery, the New Westminster Museum, and major architectural integration projects. She has been artist-in-residence at High Desert Test sites in California, SIM in Iceland, the Banff Centre for the Arts, among others in Europe and the US. Annie Briard has received awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and her works are found in public and corporate collections including those of the Art Bank of Canada, Microsoft, Scotiabank, TD bank and Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec.
Briard is a Lecturer in photography and media arts at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, on the ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples including the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations.
CHLOE BROVER | NEW YORK, NY
Split, 2023.
Archival pigment print,
20 x 15 inches.
Edition of 10.
$500 print.
"growing // smaller vol 2" is a dos-a-dos collaborative zine made under the imprint "Jumbo Shrimp Press". This project is an ongoing photographic conversation between Chloe Brover and Catie Leonard. The visual dialogue follows the artists as they separately move through life together. This series does not act as a diary, but rather a reflection on the artists’ thoughts and experiences which are bound together as parallel paths.
Split, included in Brover's half of the zine, reflects on her experiences and mental state during a tumultuous time in her life. She combines staged and documentary imagery constructing a dreamlike sequence that dissolves the boundary between reality and the surreal.
Chloe Brover is a photographic artist based in Queens, NY, whose work explores contemporary culture's dependence on image consumption and its effects on our perception of reality and sense of self through abstract self-portraits and distorted, surreal imagery.
Her artistic practice is highly material—her photobooks, collaborative zines, and lenticular and handmade photographs simultaneously counter the suspended condition of the digital images we are fed, while allowing her to reveal the image's inherent instability. By sequencing images in books and layering in lenticular prints, her images are transformed and metamorphosed through their interaction with one another. Her engagement with experimental and handmade photographic processes reflects her interest in regaining intimacy and tangibility in image-making. Often photographing hands, eyes, and mouths, she further reflects on what it means to 'consume' images.
Brover is the cofounder of “Jumbo Shrimp Press” where she creates collaborative zines including the series growing // smaller and group publication, DEEP FRIED FILM.
MATT CALARCO | LIVINGSTON, MT
Rooting for the Horse, 2023.
Archival pigment print,
16 x 20 inches, 21 x 25 inches framed.
Edition #5 of 10 + 2AP.
$1,550 framed.
False Summits examines the perception of the American West. The images that we see of the landscape inform what we know about it, and those preconceptions inform what we see. The focus of this project lies in emphasizing the filter that typically romantic imagery places between a viewer and reality - not to reveal the “real” West but to make the viewer consider how manufactured the West that they might know through photographs is.
This is approached from a variety of digital and analog methods that distance the viewer from the imagery and subvert the tropes of the American West. Sometimes, this comes in the form of rephotographing altered prints while other approaches are much more straight forward, like denying the expected horizon line iconic to the vast landscape. Though critical of the way that the West is portrayed in contemporary photography, the project comes from deep care for the land and this moral standpoint: that the chronically American condition of nostalgia provides a front much more idealistic than is justified.
Matt Calarco (b. 1996) is a photographer based in Livingston, MT. He has a little hole in his left retina and is afraid of going blind. Vision, perception, and the malleable nature of photographic truth are central to his work. He holds an MFA from the University of Hartford and a BFA from Colby College.
ANTHONY CARR | VICTORIA, BC
Untitled (47 Rockets), 2016-2018
Selection of folded gelatin silver prints and a colour c-type print,
approx. 5 x 3.5 x 8 inches each
Unique
$575 each
Inspired by the well-known anecdote and impossible feat of engineering that posits the theory of reaching the moon in 47 folds of a piece of paper, Untitled (47 Rockets) is a set of 47 photographic prints carefully folded into miniature spaceships, rockets and lunar landers. Long-exposure images of the Moon’s nocturnal journey across the heavens act as the raw material for these origami sculptures, captured through the lens of homemade pinhole cameras. The work pays homage to the archetypal space prototype model and gives a knowing nod to NASA’s recent research into origami and folding techniques to help solve a variety of space hardware construction conundrums.
The work is part of a broader interrogation of the photographic object within my wider practice, driven by a fascination with the haptic qualities of the medium and an interest in expanded photographic possibilities.
Born in the UK, Anthony Carr, is a visual artist working with photography, sculpture and more recently with moving image. He received his BA in fine art (printmaking) from Winchester School of Art (UK) in 1999 and currently lives and works in BC. Carr’s practice is rooted in experimentation, interrogating the materiality and alchemy of the analogue medium. Adopting a slow photographic approach, Carr looks to reveal something beyond human perception, visioning the invisible by capturing what can and can’t be seen with the naked eye. With a penchant for the lo-fi and DIY, he is particularly interested in and excited by the intersection of art and science. Carr has exhibited his work in galleries throughout the UK, and in countries across four continents and his 2023 debut film has been included in international film festivals. In 2021 he was awarded the inaugural Glover Rayner Prize (UK) for sustainable photography and a Greenlight film production grant from MediaNet (Canada).