UnBound14! Artist Features: V
IRIS GRIMM • JULYA HAJNOCZKY • DAVID HANDFORTH • WILL HENRY • JONAH HODARI • RACHEL JUMP • STEPHEN KAHN
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.
IRIS GRIMM | BOSTON, MA
keening, 2024,
6.25 x 7.5 x 1.5 inches,
Unique,
$1,400
In the book ‘keening’, Grimm explores the complex themes of life, death, and the rituals that bridge the two. Recent personal loss has led her to deeply reflect on how cultures process grief and honor the departed. In her search for meaning, she became captivated by the Chinese mourning tradition of burning joss paper, a practice that serves as both an offering and a form of communication with the dead.
Joss paper, often crafted from bamboo and coated with gold or silver foil, is burned as a symbolic currency for the afterlife. This act of burning, paired with inscriptions and personal messages written on the paper, allows the living to send messages to the deceased, ensuring their comfort and prosperity in the world beyond. The folding of the paper into an inglot shape before the fire is a ritual that encapsulates both reverence and the impermanence of life.
Through her work, she seeks to explore the intersection of ritual, memory, and loss. She is drawn to the idea of using physical objects to communicate across realms, and to the transformative process of turning something material—like joss paper—into something intangible through fire. By engaging with this ritual, she examines the ways in which we honor those who have passed, and how we try to maintain connections with them, even after they have left us.
This project is a meditation on the act of letting go, of honoring memory, and of finding solace in the rituals that help us navigate the mystery of death. In honoring the tradition of burning joss paper, she asks: What does it mean to speak to those who are no longer here? And how do we, as the living, continue to find meaning in the face of absence? Through this work, she hopes to create space for reflection on the rituals we create and the ways they allow us to connect with what we have lost.
Iris Grimm is an artist, photographer and bookbinder based in Boston, MA. Her work explores themes of change, the passage of time, truth and perception through photo based works and artist’s books. She studied Photography at the Art Institute of Boston and is the founder of the bindery Grimm Books. Her work has been exhibited widely across the United States.
DAVID HANDFORTH | RICHMOND, VA
Venus, 2025
Archival pigment print,
24 x 20 inches framed
Edition #1 of 4
$1,200
This work, an ongoing series, explores power, intimacy, queerness, and animal-husbandry. With a 4x5 view camera, Handforth attempts to visualize and diagnose social/sexual behaviors and expectations between queer men. These behaviors result in the domestication and transfer of sexual and or intimate desire to trained notions surrounding sexual pleasure. He illustrates this through the visual metaphor of the Broken Horse, bound and relearning their basic movements to please those holding their restraints. With this purposefully shifted perspective, Handforth photographs himself as the image of the horse, trained but recently defiant. He must be broken again. Accompanying his figure are other masculine forms, denying the viewer identification. A willingness to be seen is only captured through the self-portrait and the other horses that have been taught to remain obedient. Handforth’s practice is an exploration of sexual dynamics and social parodies that have been present throughout queer history.
David Handforth was born in Vienna, Virginia in 2002. He is receiving his BFA in photography from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2025. He is actively working with self-portraiture, equine photographs, and queer achieves to critique and dismantle understandings of desire. While living in Richmond, Virginia, he has been awarded a fellowship at Vermont Studio Center and a nomination to Yale Norfolk School of Art Summer Program.
JULYA HAJNOCZKY | CALGARY, AB
BeetleCam 1, 2024
Gelatin silver print - original paper negative from multi-aperture pinhole camera,
5.75 x 7.75 inches framed,
Unique,
$525
Hajnoczky grew up in a time when it seemed that environmental threats, once identified, inevitably led to a collective response resulting in a solution. The hole in the ozone layer was repaired. Acid rain stopped falling from the sky. We all filled our wardrobes with polar fleece made from recycled pop bottles. Activists won the War in the Woods, saving the old growth forests in ƛaʔuukʷiʔatḥ (Tla-o-qui-aht), or Clayoquot Sound, as she knew of it then. As time went on, these so-called victories that moved me deeply as a child were hollowed out, as restrictions placed on industry were rolled back bit by bit, or we realized that our well-intentioned conservation practices were deeply flawed.
Inspired by humanity’s seeming inability to peacefully coexist with our more-than-human kin, her work is a series of attempts to understand our complex relationships with plants and other living beings. Guided in part by scientific research in fields such as biology and botany, her projects take shape around intriguing bits of information that she picks up in my reading.
The theme of the BeetleCam project is an environmental issue with strong correlations to human-caused climate change. Since the 90s, populations of Mountain Pine Beetles have been exploding, expanding their territory, sweeping into and decimating huge swathes of forest in Northern Alberta, Canada. The warming climate has changed beetle behaviour in many ways: longer reproductive seasons and resulting population booms lead beetles to attack younger trees, and tree species they’d never attacked before, even in places where cold winters would have normally kept them at bay, leaving behind mountains of tinder-dry deadfall. While forest health has always relied on periodic renewal from both fires and decomposers like beetles, normal fire cycles and beetle populations have been thrown off balance by human-caused climate change, logging practices, fire suppression and more. She has been collecting samples of this tree bark, and transferring the array of holes drilled through it by beetles to make the pattern of pinholes on a series of cameras. These multi-aperture pinhole cameras were used at the locations where the bark was collected, photographing the affected forests, and eco-friendly paper developing processes were used to develop these paper photographs once she returned home.
Julya Hajnoczky was born in Calgary, Canada, and raised by hippie parents, surrounded by unruly houseplants, bookishness and art supplies, with CBC radio playing softly, constantly, in the background. Inevitably as a result, she grew up to be an artist. A graduate of the Alberta University for the Arts and current MFA candidate at Emily Carr University, her multidisciplinary practice includes digital and analog photography, and seeks to ask questions and inspire curiosity about the complex relationships between humans and the natural world. Julya has completed artist residencies at Terra Nova National Park (Newfoundland), Point Pelee National Park (Leamington, ON), the Beaty Biodiversity Museum (Vancouver, BC), and the Empire of Dirt (Creston, BC). Her work has been exhibited internationally, and has been acquired by public and private collections including the Canada Council Art Bank, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel, and was recently featured in National Geographic Magazine. In 2017, supported by grants from the Calgary Arts Development Authority and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Julya built her mobile natural history collection laboratory (a combination tiny camper and workspace, the Alfresco Science Machine), and since then has been exploring the many ecosystems of Western Canada, from Alberta’s Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park, to the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve in BC and Wood Buffalo National Park, NWT. If she's not in her home studio working on something tiny, she's out in the forest working on something big.
WILL HENRY | TUSCALOOSA, AL
I'm not holy I'm alive, 2024.
Archival pigment print on aluminum,
6 x 4 inches.
Unique.
$800.
Henry’s work delves into themes of constructed self, sexuality, intimacy, violence, cultural identities, and the profound human desire to be seen and heard. Their recent projects explore desire, lust, and voyeurism through photography, aiming to dismantle internalized shame perpetuated by an often oppressive society. This work seeks to foster a sense of Queer Salvation, creating space for healing and self-acceptance in the face of societal pressures
Will Henry is a Black Queer multimedia visual artist based in Alabama, engaging in photography, printmaking, graphic design, drawing, and book arts. They earned a BFA in fine arts, concentrating on photography, printmaking, and graphic design from the University of Montevallo, followed by an MA and MFA in studio art—also focusing on photography and printmaking—from The University of Alabama. Currently, they are pursuing an MFA in Book Arts at the University of Alabama.
JONAH HODARI | RICHMOND, VA
Washed, 2023.
Premium giclée matte print,
20 x 20 inches, framed.
Open edition.
$400 framed.
‘Black Male Study’ is a self portrait series depicting the disconnected relationship between Black men’s bodies and their personhood. In a culture built upon the identification of the Black body as a source of labor and physical danger, the internal self becomes something more conceptual rather than certain when interacting with it. Through this polaroid series Hodari explores Black men’s balance of these two realities, the autonomous self that has developed in one’s body, and the racialized silhouette that is out of the subject’s control.
Jonah Hodari is a visual artist from Richmond, Virginia (b. 2003) who explores the role of documentation within a deeply media focused culture. Through portraiture, documentary work, and narrative filmmaking, Hodari addresses American media’s active influence on our social behavior along with the gaping holes in our common notions of diversity. Hodari graduated from Emerson College with a BA in Visual Media Arts in 2024, and worked as the Co-Editor in Chief of EM Magazine. Other work experiences include assisting at the Panopticon Gallery in Boston, MA, photographing Ava Duvernay, and he is currently a staff photographer for R0ver Magazine.
RACHEL JUMP | TIJERAS, NM
The Boundary, 2024.
Archival pigment print,
25.5 x 31.5 inches, framed.
Edition #1 of 5.
$2,000 framed
As someone who has been dedicatedly creating photographs of her family for over 15 years, Jump is still humbled by their unflinching- willingness to make themselves vulnerable to her lens. Her practice explores and dissects the malleable nature of my family’s personal history. They represent a reinterpretation and examination of how individual family members react to hardship, and how trauma transforms individual perceptions of our collective family history.
Recently, her photographs have been exploring the aftermath of her father’s genetic testing results. This unveiled a hereditary disorder that heightens his susceptibility to cancer. This revelation offered a possible glimpse into our future; a rare, yet ambivalent, gift.
This work is an exploration of her family and our efforts to provide comfort and resilience for one another in times of hardship. Through this collaborative project, we guide each other through the weight of newfound clarity, supporting one another as they confront how their lineage and shared experiences shape their sense of identity.
What aspects of ourselves do they choose to inherit, and what parts lie beyond their control? her photographs reveal not only the physical and psychological traits we are capable of inheriting, but how we decide to reconcile with that truth. Through this narrative, she hopes to unveil the balance between acceptance and agency, highlighting her family’s recognition and defiance towards the path that has been carved out for them.
Rachel Jump (b. Chicago, Illinois, 1991) received her BFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2014. Her photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally, which includes Unseen Amsterdam Festival in The Netherlands, Filter Photo in Chicago, and dnj Gallery in Los Angeles. Her prints were a part of the Midwest Photography Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago from 2017-2021, and are in the permanent collection at the RISD Museum, in addition to private collections. Rachel’s work has also been featured in various print and online publications, including DIE ZEIT, i-D Germany, Der Greif, The Photo Review, FotoRoom, Museé Magazine, and Fisheye Magazine. In 2018, FotoRoom named her as one of “Ten Female Photographers You Should Know”, and was also the winner of the FotoRoom OPEN Format Edition Prize. In 2020, she was recognized as one of the top "30 Under 30" Women Photographers by ARTPIL. In 2024 her work was part of a group exhibition and monograph published by Candela Books + Photography Gallery, titled, Memory Orchards. Photographs from her latest series, Everyone if Icarus, were recently featured in an exhibition at the University of New Mexico School of Architecture + Planning, titled, COUNTER/PART.
Rachel currently resides in New Mexico with Daniel W. Coburn, and their six dogs.
STEPHEN KAHN | RICHMOND, VA • CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA
Lesser-Known Statue, 2025.
Archival pigment print,
31 x 23.5 inches, framed.
Unique.
$1,000 framed.
Lesser-known Statue is a black & white 35mm photograph of a statue on the Hudson River in Tribeca. It presents the clean, geometric shapes of art deco, and the block-like simplicity of brutalism. An unmoving concrete object, neat and crisp. Yet it upon initial viewing, there is an abstract quality present, for the world is never this calm and straightforward. Is it perfectly symmetrical, or is the position of the camera slightly off? Or is it the statue that is crooked? Is that helicopter flying by in the distance, or about to land on this structure? How tall is this object that continues off the edge of the frame, and where is it based? This challenges the viewers' sense of scale. Parts of the statue and the grain in the air surrounding it appear etched in charcoal. The archival pigment print on museum-grade matte cotton paper provides for a smooth gradient and good texture. Professionally framed in matte black pine, with a subtle notched lip. This image is part of a growing black & white series of statues, buildings and memorials that focus on light to dark, perspective, and geometry in the everyday world. I have included another from this series in my submission, which will be presented similarly to the work I describe above.
Stephen Kahn is a mostly self-taught photographer and writer originally from Baltimore, MD. He currently lives in Richmond, VA, where he works primarily in landscape and street photography, but also shoots headshots, portraits, and events. He has exhibited photographs at Art Works Inc. He also works in concrete construction, and delivers meals on wheels every Friday in Montrose.