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.

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.

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 announce our first solo show with Virginia-based photographer, Morgan Ashcom. The exhibition coincides with the release of Ashcom’s recent book, What the Living Carry, published by MACK Books.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” ― William Faulkner

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.

Visual storytelling is an art form unto itself. It can entertain us with fictional narrative, impart wisdom through documentation, or provide an escape just as literature does. This power of the narrative is immense. Opening November 4th, Candela Books + Gallery announces Chasing Tales, a group exhibition featuring photographic work by Daniel Coburn, Paul Thulin, and collaborators Antone Dolezal and Lara Shipley, all artists connecting the past and present fusing elements of reality with mysterious and imaginative intent.

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.