UnBound14! Artist Features: II
PATTY CARROLL • ALDO CERVANTES • JO ANN CHAUS • ADAM CHIN • PAMELA LANDAU CONNOLLY • RYAN A. CONTRERAS
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.
PATTY CARROLL | CHICAGO, IL
Panther, 2020.
Archival pigment print,
40 x 40 inches framed.
Edition #2 of 10.
$4,000 framed.
In Carroll’s ongoing series titled Anonymous Women: Domestic Demise, she is exploring the connection between a woman's identity and her home, specifically examining the term “housewife.” The artist creates staged, full-size interior domestic rooms for the camera filled with decor and objects that surround (or hide) a solitary female figure. The fictional scene uses a mannequin, the substitute ideal woman, who does not move, complain, or age. In the set, the woman is enveloped by her environment while creating it, with fulfilling and problematic consequences, pathetic and humorous. In each image, Carroll uses color, design, and humor to entice the viewer to relate to the woman’s plight and circumstances. The figure stands in for so many women who silently make the home a place of comfort, safety, and warmth yet are unseen heroines of their lives. Inspired by Western consumer culture and the meaning of material possessions (how belongings provide identity, continuity, and tradition.), Carroll’s female figures represent women from all backgrounds and cultures. Carroll’s photographs are metaphors for the interior lives of all women. Here, the invisible suburban woman is depicted, often considered privileged but limited by outdated expectations and overlooked in today's identity politics.
Patty Carroll is known for her use of highly intense, saturated color photographs since the 1970’s. After teaching and doing documentary photography for many years, Carroll enthusiastically returned to the studio delighting viewers with her playful critique of home and excess. Her ongoing project, “Anonymous Women: Domestic Demise,” is a series of studio installations made for the camera, addressing women and their complicated relationships with domestic life. In the still-life studio photographs (made on a full-size “stage” set) that humorously comment on the mania of running and decorating a home, the objects take over and lead to mishaps and mayhem for the lone figure of a woman. Carroll grew up in suburban Chicago, which influenced the entire series and has remained the locus of her work ever since.
The photographs are exhibited on a large scale, and previous iterations were published as a monograph, Anonymous Women, in 2017 with Daylight Books, Domestic Demise, published in 2020 by Aint-Bad Books, and a new book, Domestic Demise and Debacle released in 2025 by Paper Street. The series has been exhibited internationally, has won multiple awards, and has been acknowledged as one of Photolucida’s “Top 50” in 2104 and in 2017, and has been featured in prestigious blogs and international magazines such as the Huffington Post, the BJP in Britain, and NYT LensBlog, Washington Post Insight, Vanity Fair, Italia, and many others. Most recently, Colossal ran a wonderful updated review in April, 2024, and New City Chicago did an in-depth interview featuring her work in September 2024.
ALDO CERVANTES | SAN DIEGO • MEXICO • LOS ANGELES
Xoloitzcuintle, 2025
[20 x 16 EXHIBITION PRINT].
Archival pigment print,
15 x 12 inches framed.
Edition #1 of 20.
$1,000.
The ideas surrounding this image consists of exploring both Mesoamerican and catholic folklore embedded in Mexican culture. This piece was created in the Mexican-American border region and form part of an ongoing series, Altares (working title), that looks into themes of spirituality, migration, and the constant state of feeling trapped in between two worlds as a first generation immigrant. Cervantes’ approach to taking new images consists of a mix of formal documentary work and minimal staging to remain true to the moment. These images will be part of a zine currently in progress and expected to be realized late 2025.
Aldo Cervantes (b. 1997) is a Mexican-American artist born and raised in Tecate, Baja California, Mexico. He immigrated to the United States at an early age and began documenting his surroundings on both sides of the border as a response to the emotional baggage of being a first-generation immigrant. He received a BA in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego where he began to experiment with the archive. Inspired by his family snapshots, Cervantes looks into ideas of postmemory, migration, and labor while exploring his family history and its search for a sense of home and a brighter future. He currently lives and works between San Diego, Los Angeles, and Tecate; documenting his family, objects, and spaces that hold memories and are in dialogue with the past and present.
JO ANN CHAUS | EDGEWATER, NJ
Footprint, 2021.
Archival pigment print,
26 x 19 inches framed.
Edition #3 of 8.
$1,200 framed.
Chaus’ work focuses on the psychological states of mind of the women she performs as and their inner reflections while navigating life’s barriers, acknowledging vulnerability, in search of authenticity and wholeness, and the shifting notions of self. The past and the present collide through memory and desire, on a non-linear timeline; the images are still but the mind is in motion. Although the images are performative, there is truth in the fiction.
Jo Ann Chaus (American, b. 1954) is a lens based artist whose work explores the psychological states of mind as a modern woman through self portraiture, still life and landscape, asserting her rightful place in the larger conversation. Conversations, is due to be published in Spring 2026 by MW Editions. Her work has been exhibited widely. Special recognitions include finalist in the Aperture Portfolio prize, Critical Mass 2018-2024.
ADAM CHIN | SAN FRANCISCO, CA
Self-portrait, 2025.
Gelatin silver print,
17 x 18 inches framed.
Edition #1 of 4.
$900 framed.
Unprompted: The Emergence of Conscious AI
Conscious AI is the hypothesized state where artificial intelligence becomes self-aware and achieves a sense of consciousness. This is the moment AI crosses the boundary to what we consider to be human. Long the domain of science-fiction, the recent rapid rise of AI technology has made talk of Conscious AI much more possible. While we have yet to achieve Conscious AI, the conversational abilities of leading chatbots already give a good simulation of consciousness.
Unprompted is a visual metaphor for the emergence of Conscious AI. This photographic portrait series poses the question of what Conscious AI will “look” like if or when it happens. How human will it be? How much will it be like us, and how different will it be? And ultimately, how will we define what it means to be human?
The photographic portraits in Unprompted were generated by AI. Approximately 850 photographs of each subject were used in the training of the AI. The AI was tasked with generating an image that looked like one of the original 850 photographs. No other images were used and no artwork was appropriated from any other artist. No language prompts were used. The AI was unguided in its generation of each of these portraits.
The artwork in Unprompted are selenium toned gelatin silver prints.
Adam Chin is a fine art photographer who spent a career as a computer graphics artist for TV and film. He was one of the original employees of Pacific Data Images, a pioneering computer graphics studio which later became part of Dreamworks Animation. Adam did computer graphics lighting on the Shrek, Madagascar, How to Train Your Dragon, and Kung Fu Panda series of animated feature films.
While his first love is traditional b&w photography, Adam also practices using Machine Learning neural networks trained on databases of real photography to render images. By augmenting traditional photography with neural networks, he is exploring the concept of how much information is contained in a given photograph.
In 2020, he was named one of the Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 photo portfolio award winners, and in 2022 he won the 30 Over 50: In Context award from the Center for Fine Art Photography.
Adam also manages the photographic archive of his late uncle, Benjamen Chinn, who photographed San Francisco’s Chinatown and Paris in the late 1940’s and early 50’s.
Adam has a MS in Computer Science from Stanford and a BS in Computer Science from Yale. He lives in San Francisco.
PAMELA LANDAU CONNOLLY | PLEASANTVILLE, NY
First Day of School, 2024
Potholder loom, family photograph, archival canvas, cotton thread,
7.5 x 7.5 inches (19 inches with fringe).
Edition #1 of 3 +1AP.
$975 with ledge.
Lauren in my Room, 2024.
Potholder loom, family photograph, archival canvas, cotton thread,
7.5 x 7.5 inches (19 inches with fringe).
Edition #1 of 3 +1AP.
$975 with ledge.
A landscape can be read like a text, each element revealing a piece of a narrative. Weeds can tell stories of traveling across continents and displacing other species to dominate their new terrains. Cultivated plants have survived and spread partially through their seduction of human beings, and some animal species are now believed to have partially domesticated themselves. Landscape is something constructed, piece by piece, by many different players.
Myth of the Flat World explores this built aspect of the environment by following the same basic structure as millefleur tapestries. Each work is assembled flower by flower so that the final image contains dozens of individual photographs. Native species mix with non-native and even invasive plants, as do human and animal elements.
Pamela Landau Connolly is a lens-based artist and book maker who has been investigating the theme of home for more than 40 years. Her photographs of tin dollhouses, domestic spaces, and family portraits look closely at the American dream, exploring childhood memory and the notion of home.
Connolly's photographs are held in the collections of Brown University and the MFA Houston. Her artist book, Fly in Amber was acquired by the Hirsch Library and the Art and Design Collection at the University of Michigan. Her previous book, Cabriole, belongs to the Beineke Library at Yale and MFA Harvard. Connolly has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally. Most recently Connolly created Landau Gallery, a miniature art gallery showcasing photo-based art in 1:12 scale.
Connolly received an MFA in Photography from the Hartford Art School. She lives and works in New York's Hudson Valley.
RYAN A. CONTRERAS | LOS ANGELES, CA
Untitled, 2024
Gelatin silver print,
Approx. 5 x 4 inches; 14 x 11 inches, framed.
Edition of 5.
$2000 framed.
Both a personal meditation on the Eastern Sierras and a commentary on the U.S.’s historical view of land as resource, "Public Land" explores the natural wildness found on government owned land and the efforts to contain and harness it. Photographed and produced by a nitrate and silver gelatin process used by land surveyors in the 1920s, the images are starkly matter of fact and draw attention to the textural complexity present in scenes over hundreds of square miles owned by the Bureau of Land Management in central California. Despite their innate beauty, these images are contained, colorless, and leave space for the viewer to reflect on the individual and collective posture towards the natural world.
Ryan A. Contreras (b. 1996, USA) is a fifth generation Mexican American photographer based in Los Angeles. His work explores complex landscape formations as a mirror for the human spirit. His photographs of this innate wildness, made in cities, suburban neighborhoods, and national parks, comments on the inescapable human connection to land. In 2024, he was selected as the Bureau of Land Managements Artist in Resident in Bishop, CA. He is currently working towards publication of his first photobook.