UnBound14! Artist Features: VI
BRETT KALLUSKY • KEVIN KUNSTADT • IVANA LARROSA • MEGAN LEDBETTER • JIAYI LIANG
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.
BRETT KALLUSKY | MINNEAPOLIS, MN • RIVER FALLS, WI
The Witch (Bird Abatement) Santa Maria Regional Landfill, 2013.
Archival pigment print,
20 x 24 inches framed.
Edition #3 of 10.
$1,400 framed.
Strawberry Field, Nipomo, 2017.
Archival pigment print,
20 x 24 inches framed.
Edition #1 of 10.
$1,400 framed.
Landfill: Elegy for the
Santa Maria Valley, 2022
8 x 8.875 inches. 96 pages.
Trade book
$35
Landfill tells the story of the massive amounts of agricultural and industrial waste in one Central California valley with deep roots to the Indigenous and Spanish past. It is a meaningful addition to how we understand our way of life in this current moment in the larger climate crisis. The images reveal an unpleasant reality tucked conveniently out of view. Brett Kallusky's work shows a poise and formality, a photographic deliberateness that presents these intensely critical issues—ones we like to keep out of sight—
with seriousness and gravity. The photographs, in their studied intentionality and careful elegance, insist on the urgency of the situation and the inevitable doom that awaits if we continue to ignore what is happening all around us.”
—Rebecca A. Senf, Ph.D., Chief Curator, Center for Creative Photography
Brett Kallusky (b.1975) in St. Paul, Minnesota. He completed his B.F.A in photography at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls and his M.F.A. in photography at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Since 2007, he has taught photography full-time while maintaining an active photographic studio practice. He is currently a professor of art at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls and on the Board of Directors of SPE. His photographs have appeared in Aint-Bad Magazine and National Geographic Online, and his previous book is Journey with Views/Viaggio con Vista (self-published, 2014). Most recently his work Landfill: Elegy for the Santa Maria Valley was published by George Thompson Publishing in 2022.
Kallusky has been a Fulbright Fellow to Italy, received three Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grants and numerous Faculty Professional Development Grants from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, and is a two-time finalist for the McKnight Fellowship for Photography and Visual Arts. He resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
KEVIN KUNSTADT | NEW YORK, NY
All (My) Eyes on Me –After Berenice Abbott, 2025.
Gelatin silver print,
20 x 16 inches framed.
Edition of 3.
$900 framed.
Kunstadt started 'Pictures from Home' in 2020 during Covid lockdown. He was living in a one bedroom New York City apartment with three windows facing North and South. In a moment of cognitive reframing, he decided to think of being stuck in the small space as an opportunity for play and exploration.
Being on his own for months on end, he craved human contact: just the basic human touch of skin on skin, which was absent from that existence. He had a desire to photograph bodies– the figure, other humans, in a way he had not really felt before. However, the only body really available to me was his own. So he moved towards utilizing my body, in his space, to make images.
Up to this point in his practice, he had shied away from self portraiture, and in general had been focused on the outside world. However, at this moment, the focus necessarily turned inward– literally into the domestic space, rather than the outside world; and psychologically towards the interior of the mind, away from photography working as a ‘window,’ and towards it as a ‘mirror.’
He rummaged the Internet and his collection of books for reference material and ended up with a stack of prints from photography, art history, and the worldwide web that all inspired him to make new pictures at home. He wanted the images to be fun and also a bit fantastical- an escape from the everyday mundane space he was in.
He also started to play with language– titles and captioning in relation to his images. The title of the project itself is an obvious reference to Larry Sultan’s project of the same name. However, the pictures from this home point towards a different universe entirely.
Kevin Kunstadt (b. 1982, New York, NY) lives and works in New York, NY. He received his BA in Visual Art from Brown University in 2004, and his MFA in photography from Hartford Art School’s international limited residency program in 2017.
Since 2010 Kunstadt has produced several photographic projects in book form, on subjects as varied as: asphalt road resurfacing, gunpowder, scrap metal, and “sneakers, bricks, and politics.” These have been nominated for the Mack First Book Award, and shortlisted for the Kassel, Luma Rencontres, Fiebre, and La Fabrica Dummy Awards. His book 'All for the Best' was published by Penumbra Foundation in 2020 and he managed Penumbra’s Risograph Print and Publication Residency Program for its first three years.
IVANA LARROSA | NEW YORK, NY
Dionysus a.k.a. Dionisio (Engrams series, 2023), 2023.
Archival pigment print,
20 x 16 inches framed.
Edition of 5 + 2AP.
$900 framed.
Larrosa works with my family photographs from the late 19th and 20th centuries. She distorts, combines and alters these photographs in order to ignite and re-animate them. Through her practice, she impresses my own destiny on to the visual story of her family and brings that history into her nomadic present.
Ivana Larrosa is a visual artist from Spain living in New York City. She works primarily with photography, video and performance.
Larrosa's work has been shown at at Art venues and Museums including Anthology Film Archives, International Center of Photography, The Exponential, Queens Museum, The Center for Fine Art Photography, Project Space Kleiner Salon, Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, and Galeria Sicart, among others. Larrosa's work is at the permanent collection of Foundations, Museums, Institutions and Collections such as Bassat Private Collection and Spanish National Museum of Sculpture. Most recently, my film “Beach Birds: The Shaman, The Guardian, The Journey” has been selected as part of the on-demand performance and video art platform, PerformVu/ Lucid.
Ivana Larrosa has received several grants such as City Artist Corps Grant of New York, Lluís Carulla Foundation Individual Artist Grant, and Museum of Tortosa Artist in Residency, and numerous awards, including Ramon Aloy International Photographic Award and Camera Club of New York Baxter St, Annual Juried Competition.
She has been a dedicated NEW INC Mentor at the New Museum of Contemporary Art from 2020 to 2023 (Y7, Y8, & Y9), as well as a panelist of Brooklyn Arts Council, Bronx and Queens Council.
Ivana holds a BA in Film and Media Studies from University of Navarra (Spain) and a Master of Fine Arts at Bard College-International Center of Photography (New York, 2016), where she was awarded with the ICP Director’s Scholarship and taught video installation and performance.
MEGAN LEDBETTER | CHATTANOOGA, TN
November Abstraction, 2023
Fiber based gelatin silver print,
approx. 24 x 20 inches unframed.
Edition of 3.
$2,500 framed.
“Desolation! Desolate is the spot and wild the road, if road it can be called that leads to it. […] For a generation an acre of ground hidden in the hills has been used to receive the remains of unclaimed and indigent dead and still half the people one meets knows not where it is. To find it the seeker must blindly follow the trails leading over the spurs of Walden’s Ridge.”
There are many written accounts describing the horrid conditions, criminal trespasses, and overall lack of humanity in a place now referred to as The Field, a derelict municipal cemetery in operation from 1890-1912. During years of interment, the land was no more than a dumping ground on the outskirts of Chattanooga, and the historical narrative is clear that this place has been deeply wounded time and again, still carrying the trauma of indecency, betrayal, and abandonment. While most visual signifiers of loss, grief, and racial terror have been erased to time and collective memory, echos from the historical record resound through the landscape. "... for at midday the shadows in the vicinity are almost as deep as at eventide on the plain and whatever spirits may be abroad need not there wait for nightfall.”
The field is no grassy meadow, enclosed by fence or hedgerow, but rather a steep embankment shrouded in kudzu, with honeysuckle and privet invading the forested areas. Lush, large-format black and white images convey a meditative response to the unrelenting force of seasonal change upon a damaged landscape. Elevating quiet moments of growth, destruction, and rebirth eludes to the unnoticed decades and the intentional abandonment of the place, while also reflecting upon human fragility.
If we listen attentively we can respond to the call, “If there is a blot on the civilization of Hamilton county that make-believe cemetery is it. [...] Humanity demands something respectable.”
(All quotes from Chattanooga Daily Times, 2 September 1906)
Megan Ledbetter (1980) is an artist and educator based in Red Bank, Tennessee, whose lens-based work explores concepts of community and belonging through narrative visual storytelling
Her current photographic project,The Field, is part of a larger collaborative initiative to recognize and repair a derelict municipal cemetery for the poor and dispossessed in operation from 1890-1912. Through generous support from the Current Art Fund (2023-2024), her work combines visual imagery, historical research, and community engagement to shine a light on the complex overlapping histories at this abandoned burial ground.
She earned her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2011), a BFA from East Tennessee State University (2008), and a BA from Auburn University (2002). She attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2013, was awarded a Resident Artist Fellowship from Anderson Ranch Arts Center in 2014, and will attend Stove Works Artist Residency in Chattanooga, TN in 2025.
JIAYI LIANG | RICHMOND, VA
Only When It Filled You Let You Know There’d Been a Hole in You Before, 2024
Archival inkjet print, mixed media
30 x 24 x 6 inches.
Unique.
$3,000.
The Long Season investigates landscape as both an ecological site and as a vessel for subversive imagination, shifting between Western landscapes and constructed paper dioramas. Liang’s lens-based visual practice examines how East Asian women’s bodies and traumas are shaped by patriarchal structures, utilizing paper as a material that embodies resistance by way of destruction and reconstruction.
Through paper cutouts of her body, layered landscapes, and archival photographs, she symbolically deconstructs and reassemble the self, confronting the imprints of systemic violence and cultural oppression on both personal and collective identities. This process not only engages with the cyclical nature of trauma but also interrogates its lingering effects on the body and psyche. By fragmenting and repositioning these representations, she navigates the tension between loss and reconstruction, absence and presence.
The act of cutting is both an assertion of control and a confrontation with erasure. Transferring her body onto paper omitting her face becomes a strategy to address both personal vulnerability and external censorship. These cutouts recall the imagery of China dolls—historically fetishized objects that have reduced Asian women to ornamental symbols. By repositioning and animating these figures within her photographs, she reclaims the authority to define her own image, and challenge imposed narratives that have long dictated the visibility of Asian female bodies. Image-making becomes a process of resistance, a way to carve out a space where autonomy is restored.
Her work is also a testament to time and labor. It alludes to the invisible labor of Asian women throughout Western history—how their bodies have been continuously shaped, consumed, and repurposed within colonial systems and global capitalism. At the same time, her work serves as evidence of resistance and liberation forged through time. By engaging with the physicality of paper, the constructed nature of landscapes, and the transformative potential of image-making, The Long Season reclaims a visual language that has historically been used to marginalize, offering instead a space of reconstruction, defiance, and self-determination.
Jiayi Liang is a Chinese lens-based artist whose work navigates the intersections of feminism, trauma, and photography. By constructing landscapes that collage photo cutouts with physical spaces, she examines the ways in which East Asian women’s bodies are shaped by patriarchal structures as well as their historical narratives. Her practice engages photography as both a tool of resistance and a space for reimagining agency.
Liang held a solo exhibition, The Long Season, at Public Space One Gallery in Iowa City (2024). She is also featured in Nifty Fifty – Celebrating Half a Century of ICP Book Fair at the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York (2024). Her work was included in the 12th International Combined Caucus Juried Exhibition (SPE) and recognized on the Honorable Shortlist for the Photo Forum Santa Fe Photography Award (2021).
Liang is currently an MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University and holds a BFA in Studio Art from the University of New Mexico.