Candela Gallery is excited to announce UnBound9!, our annual juried and invitational exhibition. UnBound! is the only open call the gallery holds each year and is dedicated to featuring a wide range of photographic artworks. The mission of UnBound! is to generate opportunities and exposure beyond the traditional group or juried show by providing a collection opportunity for artists.

To support our artists, photo friends, and community, near and far, Candela has put together a series of weekly virtual exhibitions called HOMEBOUND. Over the next 5 weeks we will be featuring 1-3 works from 5 different photographers, opening every Tuesday.

wILD cLAY is an exhibition of artworks by Tim Roda, exploring clay and photography as artistic mediums connected by uncharacteristic utility. The works in this exhibition embrace the functional history of clay as a vessel, making photography and material a means of exploratory documentation. The vessels in wILD cLAY function as clay cameras, while also existing as fragile, earthen material and crudely created domestic ecosystems. The resulting pinhole cameras and large scale photographs present questions about freedom and responsibility, raised by curiosity and ingenuity, with regard to our constructed and natural environments.

Body, Object, Image brings together six artists, each with a history working with clay objects, photographic images, and the human body, to elevate their authentic, unvarnished female perspectives. The exhibition features works by Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Teri Frame, Julie Malen, Margaret Meehan, Claire Sherwood, and Xia Zhang.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.”

Candela Gallery is excited to present the first show of the new year: Science as Muse, an exhibition featuring photographic works from Walter Chappell, Caleb Charland, Rose-Lynn Fisher, Pam Fox, Daniel Kariko, Michael Rauner, Robert Shults, and Susan Worsham.

The eight artists in Science as Muse share a particular interest in science, though their artistic interpretations vary dramatically. Included in this exhibition are artists who have been caught up in the documentation of the incredible worlds within which scientists practice their craft. Other artists use sophisticated equipment made possible only by modern scientific innovation. Some approach their creation through the foundational scientific process, asking questions and applying scientific method, producing unexpected results. Finally, there are those artists who have recontextualized science and its paraphernalia, imbuing or even circumventing the essence of time-tested practical applications with aesthetic pursuits.

As the General Election approaches, Candela Books + Gallery introduces STUMP; a group exhibition featuring photographic artists whose work is politically salient, couched in national issues, or generally steeped in concerns we are all facing.

With STUMP, our hope is to sponsor discussion around an array of issues at the forefront of national debates. The photographic works featured draw on our current culture and provide a lens through which to examine issues both locally and globally important.

Candela Gallery is pleased to announce By The Grace Of God, our second solo show from Richmond, Virginia based photographer, Susan Worsham.

Over the past nine-years, Susan Worsham has let curiosity and a sense of nostalgia guide her, traveling quiet roads, to warmly lit places, engaging with people she meets along the way. Her portraits illustrate collaborative reflections of fleeting moments shared between strangers. Images of backyards, shrouded by overgrowth, lush with vivid color are rich with a deeper truth. Dated facades, blanketed by dust, are each a chronicle of time’s passage. Worsham’s work often serves as metaphor for her own life experiences.

Candela Books + Gallery is pleased to present Andreas Rentsch: Experiments in Time, a comprehensive view of Rentsch’s photographic career.

Andreas Rentsch is a New York based photographer who deliberately challenges conventional approaches to photography. Though Rentsch’s works exemplify the literal definition of photography, ‘writing with light,’ his emphasis on experimentation and chance yields an innovative hybrid of analog photography, uncertainty, and performance art.

Candela Books is pleased to announce our sixth book release, Direct Positive, with Richmond, Virginia native and fine art photographer, Willie Anne Wright. This new release is scheduled for November 2015 and will be accompanied with an exhibition at Candela Books + Gallery in Richmond, Virginia.