UnBound14! Artist Features: VII
ZOE CONGYU LIU • ADAM LONG • AMANDA MARCHAND & LEAH SOBSEY • JORDAN MARTY • C. MEIER
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.
ZOE CONGYU LIU | LOS ANGELES, CA
Palace, #4, 2021.
Archival pigment print,
25x31 inches framed.
Edition #1 of 5 + 1AP.
$2,500 framed.
Palace, #5, 2021.
Archival pigment print,
25x31 inches framed.
Edition #1 of 5 + 1AP.
$2,500 framed.
Palace examines the construction and reimagination of gender narratives through visual representation. The project draws inspiration from the traditional Chinese saying “女人不可登大雅之堂”—which translates to “A woman does not belong in the halls of power.” This phrase reflects a long-standing history of women being confined to passive roles, both in society and in artistic traditions.
By altering the dynamics between male and female protagonists, Palace subverts conventional visual hierarchies, creating images that feel both familiar and destabilizing. Through this work, Liu challenge these ingrained structures, prompting a reconsideration of gender, authority, and representation in contemporary image-making.
Congyu (Zoe) Liu, born in Beijing, China 1999, is an interdisciplinary artist who uses photography, film and video installation to explore the themes of female visibility and the Asian diaspora’s generational traumas and loss. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Melbourne and a Master of Fine Arts degree in photography at the California Institute of the Arts. She is the 2024 Now Trending: 8th Annual Alpay Scholarship Award winner. Congyu has recently exhibited her work in California Brand Library & Art Center, Palos Verdes Art Center, Santa Clarita City Hall, Good Mother Gallery, The Winchester Gallery (British).
ADAM LONG | PORTLAND, OR
Covered Land #6, 2025.
Archival pigment print,
20 x 24 inches framed.
Edition #1 of 5.
$800.
Newberg Oregon is about 45 minutes from Portland. It's considered to be a town with "affordable housing". Long has been a resident since 2018 and, during the past 4 years, its housing inventory has increased by 15%. The interesting part about this rapid development is how the landscape continues to undergo transformation. The construction moves through cycles of change where the finished homes convert the once horizontal landscape into one that is vertical.
Adam J Long was born in Washington State in 1978. He studied photography in Los Angeles, California (BA), Sunderland, England (MA) and Hartford, Connecticut (MFA). His photographs have been exhibited internationally and are in the permanent collection of The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, The Hirsch Library – Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, among others. He currently resides in Newberg, OR with his wife and three children where he teaches photography.
AMANDA MARCHAND & LEAH SOBSEY
BROOKLYN, NY / GREENSBORO, NC
This Earthen Door, 2024
8 x 10 inches,
Edition of 1000.
$120
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.
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.
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.
JORDAN MARTY | RICHMOND, VA
Untitled (field recordings + Ojibwe), 2024.
Reformed and carbonized fiber base silver gelatin print, stereo amplifier,
12 x 13.5 x 7 inches.
Unique.
$1,200.
In this 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.
Paper and charcoal made from fiber base silver gelatin prints form a work that is mounted to an audio amplifier and functions as a "speaker grill”. This new photographic print is conceptually authored by the numerous moments contained within the pulped photographic histories it is composed of, in addition to the composed and ambient sound that moves through it in perpetuity.
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.
C. MEIER | PORTLAND, OR
Cyan-Red-Magenta-Yellow, 2024.
Instant internal dye diffusion transfer print (Polaroid SX-70),
mounted on yellow plexiglass,
12.625 x 10.5 inches.
Unique.
$800.
Magenta-Cyan-Red-Yellow-Green-Magenta, 2025.
Instant internal dye diffusion transfer print (Polaroid SX-70),
mounted on yellow plexiglass,
12.625 x 10.5 inches.
Unique.
$800.
Chromatic abstractions mounted and presented on vibrant sheets of neon plexiglass—are experiments with form and process. Inspired by the concept of Concrete Photography, a sub-genre of Concrete Art, Meier’s work aims to embody the truest form of photography by radically dismantling the traditional viewpoints of how time, photo-sensitive material, and representation function in photography. For concrete photographs, the photographic object is the only thing that is real. Meier’s photographs are not of something, they are something.
Pure geometry and color are manifested using techniques akin to making a photogram – hand cut stencils dodge and burn various exposures of colored light onto Polaroid film. Each image is conceptualized first as a drawing to plan exposure sequencing. Meier then pairs a semi-controlled approach with improvisation and chance. Working completely sightless, they give up control of the outcomes by only using touch as a guide, a sense often undervalued in the making of a photograph.
Camera-less, the Polaroid film offers a canvas of immediacy and physicality, processed through a self-contained set of chemistry manually spread across the film. The interaction between the artist’s hand, light sensitive material, and chemistry ignites a visual play of color and form. By embracing the unpredictability of these processes the work can never be replicated and the specific physical actions that took place cannot be reproduced. Like a painting, each image is unique. Standalone and paired Polaroids are mounted to glowing plexiglass as a reference to the light used in the work’s exposure. The final result is a fixed photographic object that recalls its own process of conception through materiality.
C. Meier (American, b. 1982, they/them) is a non-binary artist and curator based in Portland, OR. Their art practice explores materiality, reveling in the hybridization of processes including drawing and photographic methods. They earned their MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago (2017) and BFA in Studio Art from Pacific Lutheran University (2004).
Meier has exhibited at Solas Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center, Mana Contemporary (Chicago), Filter Space, Blue Sky, The Neon Heater, among others, and their work is part of the Permanent Collection of Pacific Lutheran University (Tacoma, WA). Meier co-curated the 2017 exhibition "re:collection" at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (MoCP), and curated the 2023 exhibition "Size Matters" for Medium Photo, San Diego. Professional roles include Collections Manager/Registrar (2018-2020) at the MoCP, Studio Assistant to Barbara Kasten (2019-2020), and Exhibitions Director (2021 - current), at Blue Sky, Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts.