TABLE
GROUP EXHIBITION
November 7 – December 20, 2025
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
In conversation with Stephanie Shih’s solo exhibition, Little Eats 小吃, Candela will be featuring a selection of still and moving image works centered around the table as a space for sustenance, dialogue, and connection between humans and the greater world.
Including works by:
ALANNA AIRITAM
RILEY GOODMAN
MARCIA BRICKER HALPERIN
CLAIRE ROSEN
DANA SHERWOOD
ALANNA AIRITAM
ABOUT THE WORK
Through the familiar and sumptuous visual language of European still life, Alanna Airitam’s White Privilege presents questions of racial injustice woven within the American narrative. The work combines ideals and references to America’s past, present, and future of inequality as the still life’s elements decay across three panels.
ABOUT ALANNA
Alanna Airitam is a photo-based conceptual artist based in Tucson, Arizona. Airitam pushes the traditional boundaries of photography by incorporating materials such as metal, resin, varnish, and gold into her work. Her work is inspired by the lighting of 17th century Renaissance paintings, early Black studio photography, and historic and contemporary narratives.
Airitam's work has garnered recognition with features in notable publications such as the Chicago Tribune, BBC News, Artdoc Photography Magazine, and Lenscratch, Her work has been exhibited and collected at esteemed institutions including the Center for Creative Photography, New Orleans Museum of Art, the Fidelity Collection, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, and Rhode Island School of Design Museum. She was awarded the 2020 San Diego Art Prize, 2020 Michael Reichman Project Grant Award, 2020 Critical Mass Finalist, 2021 Silver List, and 2023 Project Mesquite: New Works Grant from Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona.
Driven by a commitment to empowering emerging artists of color, Airitam serves as a valuable board member for Medium Photo and Oakwood Arts, organizations dedicated to fostering opportunities for underrepresented creatives. She co-founded the Southwest Black Artists Collective, a platform that champions the voices and contributions of Black artists within the Southwest region. Additionally, she promotes the work of undergrad and grad students through the MA Homecoming Program and mentors emerging artists from low economic backgrounds to use their voice and to help open doorways in the art world.
RILEY GOODMAN
ABOUT THE WORK
Riley Goodman’s styled still life compositions of silver platters, sliced fruits, and ashtrays tap into his ongoing series, To Cultivate A Magnolia, which tells the story of his coming of age alongside a place imbued with an almost indescribable magic where past and present coexist. Referencing the hardiness of its leaves in tandem with the delicacy of its flowers, To Cultivate A Magnolia poetically visualizes the mythology of the American South through the folklore and history of Richmond and greater Virginia, the complexities of queer identity, the contemporary presence of the American Civil War, and reflections that come as we age.
ABOUT RILEY
Riley Goodman, raised in the Patapsco River Valley of Maryland, inquires folklore, American history, and humankind's relation to the environments they inhabit in an effort to understand what endures, and how this manifests through the passage of time. Informed by the compositional styles of cinema and painting, Goodman weaves a vast visual narrative inspired by everything from historical accounts and folk-based storytelling to dreams and familial legends.
Goodman’s recent acknowledgements include “Best In Show,” in Iridian Gallery’s Bling It Out!, Photolucida’s Critical Mass Top 200, and an Honorable Mention for Lenscratch’s Art + History Award.
In 2022, he published a monograph with Fall Line Press entitled From Yonder Wooded Hill, and his work has been included in additional recent publications by Float Magazine, Atlanta Center of Photography, Pearl Press, Kris Graves Projects, and Candela Books.
His work is in collections at MoMA Artist Book Collection, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, James Branch Cabell Library Special Collections, VCU, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, UMBC, Franklin Furnace Archive, Pratt Institute, Candela Gallery, Quirk Hotel, The American Civil War Museum and the The Museum of Howard County History. Goodman graduated with a BFA in Photography from VCU’s School of the Arts in 2018 and currently lives and works in Richmond, VA.
MARCIA BRICKER HALPERIN
ABOUT THE WORK
Viewers are transported to a neighborhood diner in Marcia Bricker Halperin’s series of people eating at the now-closed Dubrow’s Cafeteria locations in 1970’s, reconnecting with the experience of a communal space and a shared meal.
ABOUT MARCIA
Marcia Bricker Halperin, a New York-based photographer, has spent over 50 years documenting the ever-changing scenes of the city’s streets.
With an interest in open-ended narrative and its potential for subtle and layered meaning, her long-form storytelling explores notions of place, identity, home, community, and biculturalism.
Halperin holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Brooklyn College and developed her eye under the guidance of former Photo League photographers, including Walter Rosenblum and Lisette Model, who encouraged her to capture the evolving landscape of the city. In the late 1970s, she was active in the Photographers Forum, an organization that was a continuation of the 1940s Photo League, reflecting their humanistic and aesthetic concerns. She assisted with organizing their meetings and panels held at the New School, which featured photographers such as W. Eugene Smith and Roy DeCarava. She attended the evening photography class taught by Lisette Model and walked Ms. Model back to her Greenwich Village home after class.
From 1978 to 1980 she was employed by the CETA Artist’s Project under the auspices of the Cultural Council Foundation. As a member of the documentation team, her assignments included photographing the Soviet refugees and their introduction to American culture in Brighton Beach, documenting housing issues in Hell's Kitchen, and taking many of the photographs of Mierle Laderman Ukeles' iconic conceptual project, Touch Sanitation.
Halperin's work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Brooklyn Museum and the International Center of Photography, as well as in a recent solo exhibition at the Edward Hopper House Museum in Nyack, NY.
CLAIRE ROSEN
ABOUT THE WORK
In the grand sets of Claire Rosen’s Fantastical Feasts, various animals are presented dining at tables overflowing with their favorite foods. As a distinctly human ritual associated with status and elegance, the formal banquet, via iconography of The Last Supper, encourages viewers to consider those in the animal kingdom more humanly, affording them more rights and status. The feasts invite viewers to reflect on the nature of society, our relationship and responsibility to the creatures with which we share the planet.
ABOUT CLAIRE
Claire Rosen is an award-winning artist known for her imaginative photography — featuring a whimsical exploration of the intersection of art, history and nature. Her hallmark images include charming animals presented in fantastical anthropomorphized settings. Her still life work reimagines lush flora within a classical painterly tradition. Her lifelong love of all creatures has led Claire to a distinctive approach that integrates live animals into her creative process — engaging viewers to reflect more deeply on the nature of animals.
Early in her career, she was twice named to Forbes’ “Best 30 under 30” list for Art & Design. Her work has also received accolades from industry publications like the Aesthetica Art Prize, Communication Arts Annual, IPA, Graphis, PDN Annual, Photoville Fence, Photolucida Critical Mass, Prix de la Photographie, and Sony World Awards. Her work has been featured in publications including Architectural Digest, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, PhotoVogue, NPR, The Guardian, Harper’s Magazine, Refinery29, and The Washington Post.
Claire’s artwork has been exhibited widely, from New York to Seoul, and has been included in both solo and group shows at venues such as AIPAD at the NYC Armory, Annenberg Space for Photography, Aperture Gallery, SCAD Savannah Museum of Art and The Center for Maine Contemporary Art. For five consecutive years she has been included on the Photoville Fence in multiple cities—Atlanta, Boston, Brooklyn, Calgary, Houston, and Santa Fe. Her work is displayed on the walls of Instagram's Headquarters, Rockefeller Center, and the new World Trade Center.
Claire is also a sought-after educator, public speaker and author. Her book, IMAGINARIUM: The Process Behind the Pictures, offers insight into her creative practice and presents tools for the artistic process. She is profiled in the book, “Why We Photograph Animals” by Huw Lewis-Jones. As a brand ambassador for FujiFilm USA, she continues to influence and educate within the photography community.
DANA SHERWOOD
(b.1977, Long Island, New York) Lives and works in The Hudson Valley, NY.
Dana Sherwood is an American artist whose diverse practice explores the relationship between humans and the natural world in order to understand culture and behavior in a changing environment. Employing video, painting and sculpture in her work, nature, often in the form of non-human animals, plays a complex role as both subject and collaborator, asserting its presence and subverting the artists’ perceived control. Sherwood relies upon her own style of magical-realism to portray contact between human and non-human animals as a tool to expand our concept of communication and knowledge, and more importantly to recognize the interconnectedness of our ecosystem. What we can learn from plants and animals when we shift our perception to be more inclusive and open to other intelligences. Her paintings, videos, and sculptures depict ritualized feedings created for animals who live on the frontiers of human civilization such as raccoons, possums, and foxes as well as for our close companion species like horses and dogs. The animals assert their presence and desires as the work reflects on the Anthropocene, and our place in the natural world. Set in a magical, wonderland-esque universe, the work weaves together visually beautiful and occasionally humorous imagery while conveying important messages related to ecology, mythology and eco-feminism.
Since graduating from the University of Maine in 2004, Sherwood has exhibited throughout The Americas, Europe and Australia including solo exhibitions at The Florence Griswold Museum, Nagle-Draxler Reiseburogalerie (Cologne), Denny Gallery (NY) and Kepler Art-Conseil (Paris). Her work has also been shown at Storm King (NY), The Jack Shainman School, The Fellbach Sculpture Triennial (Germany), Pink Summer Gallery (Italy), Kunsthal Aarhus, The Palais des Beaux Arts Paris, Marian Boesky Gallery, Socrates Sculpture Park, Flux Factory, The Biennial of Western New York, Prospect 2: New Orleans, Scotia Bank Nuit Blanche (Toronto), dOCUMENTA 13, and many other venues worldwide. Her survey exhibition, "Dana Sherwood: Animal Appetites and Other Encounters in Wildness" opened at the Florence Griswold Museum in 2022 with accompanying catalog.