This annual summer group exhibition is the only open call we hold each year and is dedicated to featuring a wide range of photographic artworks and fine art photography and artists' books from 40-50 fine art photographers. UnBound! generates opportunities and exposure beyond the traditional group or juried show by providing a collection opportunity for artists.

Alanna Airitam: The Golden Age is a tribute to Black culture and Black histories. In an effort to reframe the narrative of western art history, Airitam reconstructs prominent imagery of power with Black men and women. Dressed in vintage garments and adorned with lush fruit and flowers, Airitam’s majestic portraits confront and recontextualize the way African Americans have been perceived and recorded throughout art’s history.

Since the mid-1990s, Patty Carroll has been examining female identity, both by way of and through domesticity. Anonymous Women is a series of portraits of shrouded women in exuberant drapery, manifested as homespun vignettes of mannequins, inundated with household objects. Carroll approaches the topic of domesticity through the lens of her own life and through other cultures. With a wry but lighthearted humor, the weight of the accouterments is couched comfortably between absolute suffocation and mere decoration.

Candela Books + Gallery is excited to announce BRING A DATE, a celebration of nightlife and music from the mid-1970s to the present day. Through the lens of six established and emerging artists, the exhibition features both still and moving imagery that celebrates America after dark, from the boroughs of New York to the late night denizens of Los Angeles, Chicago and Virginia. Included in this exhibition are works by Michael Abramson, Bill Bernstein, Thurston Howes, Jessica Lehrman, Reuben Radding and Safi Alia Shabaik.

Candela Books + Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by David Emitt Adams. The exhibition will open on Friday, September 6th and will be on view through Sunday, October 27th. Please join us for an opening reception and artist talks on Thursday, September 5th, from 5- 8 pm.

Candela Books + Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Justin James Reed. The exhibition will open on Friday, September 6th and will be on view through Sunday, October 27th. Please join us for an opening reception and artist talks on Thursday, September 5th, from 5- 8 pm.

Candela Books + Gallery is excited to share with you the new additions to the Candela Collection. THANK YOU artists, contributors, attendees, volunteers, friends and family! This years’ UnBound8! fundraiser was the most successful one to date!

UnBound! features a wide array of photographic techniques from both emerging and established artists, both locally and abroad. We are very proud to bring you a compelling selection of photographic work for the eighth year in a row!

Dear Leader is a multimedia exhibition that casts a light on the existential weight of nuclear proliferation and the harrowing threat of nuclear violence. These fears generate a deep undercurrent of uncertainty that rests underneath our daily lives. The participating artists seek to provide personal reflections on the past and ask us to consider, if just for the moment, the present and future concerns of nuclear proliferation against our current geopolitical landscape.

Pine Tree Ballads is a poetic memoir, featuring the artist’s daughter, wife, mother, and grandmother as a single protean character (or multiple characters?) vibrating in time, navigating the mysteries and menace of a shared ancestral forest. This deeply personal photographic sequence is part visual narrative of family myths and part origin story. Pine Tree Ballads is fueled by both truth and imagination, which, in many instances are the fundamental ingredients of our personal history. The “docu-literary” structure of this monograph celebrates and fully exploits the duplicitous nature of photography/text to be simultaneously interpreted as both fact and fiction. At the surface, this project explores the emotive, contextual, and material constructs of history, culture, personal identity, memory, and folklore.

This annual summer group exhibition is the only open call we hold each year and is dedicated to featuring a wide range of photographic artworks and fine art photography and artists’ books from 40-50 fine art photographers. UnBound! generates opportunities and exposure beyond the traditional group or juried show by providing a collection opportunity for artists.

Candela Gallery is pleased to open 2019 with #InHonor, a solo exhibition by Ervin A. Johnson. Spurred by personal experiences as a queer Black man and the killing of Black people across America, #InHonor is a series of photographic mixed media portraits that stand as a visceral response to racism and police brutality done to the Black body.

Candela Gallery is pleased to announce its second collaboration with One Day Projects founder and creators, Eliot Dudik & Jared Ragland. One Day Projects promotes creative dialogue by challenging artists to collaboratively produce and publish innovative projects within a 24-hour time period. And light followed the flight of sound is their third collaborative artist book inspired by both the natural wonder and symbolic possibilities of the 2017 solar eclipse. The book features photographs by 52 artists and is presented as a 30-foot-long, hand-bound accordion with an enclosed saddle-stitched zine and essay.

Candela Gallery is pleased to present ATOM | PLANET, a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist, Anne Arden McDonald. Within this series McDonald creates photographic works imbued with celestial and atomic aesthetics. Approaching her darkroom process like a sort of alchemy, McDonald captures a dialogue nebulously drifting between mediums by testing materials and techniques through experimentation, noting variables, and observing the results, and amending processes.

Candela Gallery is pleased to present CHANNELS, a group exhibition featuring photographs and mixed media works by Courtney Johnson, Lisa Kokin, and Willie Anne Wright. The exhibition features three artists whose work evokes a transformative experience; each imbued with elements of salt, filament, or flora to create new forms.

CHANNELS opens September 7th with an artist reception on September 6th, from 5-8pm and runs through October 20th.

Candela Gallery is excited to announce UnBound7!, Candela’s annual juried & invitational exhibition. UnBound! features a wide array of photographic techniques from both emerging and established artists, both locally and abroad. We are very proud to bring you a compelling selection of photographic work for the seventh year in a row!

A huge THANK YOU goes out to all who have submitted work to our UnBound7! exhibition. Again this year, we had a ton of great submissions to consider and we appreciate the opportunity to bring such an ambitious show to our audience here in Richmond.

In his first solo exhibition at Candela Gallery, Harrison Walker presents his Portals project, highlighting a mix of photographic processes through a series of abstract works. In Walker’s words, the series is “an investigation of photographic chemistry, psychological perceptions, and ideas of duplication, mimicry, and the multiple.” Through experimentation and discovery the varied effects of his photographic, printmaking, and drawing techniques, seek to elicit not only an emotional but also a fundamentally experiential viewing.

Chris McCaw returns to Candela Gallery in his second solo exhibition featuring work from his recent projects, as well as new work from his Sunburn series. Over the last decade, Chris has continued to push the boundaries of the photographic medium, sharing his unconventional techniques for capturing the movement and the power of the sun as it travels through his viewfinder. With hand-built cameras and vintage photographic paper, McCaw creates unique pieces documenting the sun’s movement through illusory land and seascapes. Long exposures throughout a day, or over multiple days, materialize as marks and burns made directly by the sun’s light as it exposes the paper. As McCaw writes, through this collaborative process, “the sun has become an active participant in part of the printmaking.”

Good Thursday, All!

I want to take a moment to write a thank you and issue an update from the director’s chair. I used to write all of these Candela newsletters with an irreverent air, tucking in a photo koan or limerick but as with so many things, our operation has matured somewhat over the last 7+ years. And so have I, maybe? …pausing for the wave of existential nausea to pass… but we have been dancing pretty hard, trying to pull you onto the dance floor with us. And so, our general goal is to put out the most effective PR and messaging we can for the artists and institutions with whom we are partnering.