Photography & _____

Image: Cultural Weekly features two current exhibitions at CEG

Alanna Airitam / Wayne Martin Belger

American Decay is a collaboration that consists of two images from two different projects, The Beauty of Decay, (2007-current), Wayne Martin Belger and White Privilege, (2020), Alanna Airitam. These images converge to tell a story that addresses the greed and excessive nature of American culture based on narcissism, selfishness and entitlement. Owning a home was once the pillar iconic representation of the American dream. The home in the photo is part of a homesteading project in Wonder Valley, California called the Small Tract Act (STA) of 1938. People started building 12’x20’ homes and lived in them as a requirement to receive five acres for free. By the late 1970’s almost all of them were abandoned mostly due to the inhospitable environment of the desert with no running water, sewage, and few people had electricity. While investigating these properties, it was surprising to see how much stuff people had accumulated in these tiny spaces. It became important to understand why Americans consume and hoard and then abandon these things once we realize they don’t make us happy. We house them in storage units, throw them away, or send then to second-hand thrift stores before going out and purchasing more. What became evident was the decay in the psyche of what we once considered important (family, community, health, etc.) while trying to fill the void with temporary, plastic pleasures. Inside the home is a table filled with more stuff. We see the pig’s head centered in this vanitas on a silver platter with a silver spoon pointing toward his mouth. The pig cannot see his reflection in the mirror so it is impossible for him to see how his own ego affects his surrounding environment. The false entitlement of American exceptionalism and belief that he has immanent domain over nature, religion and authority over all people, places, and things is overcompensation for his insecurities, deficiencies, and selfishness that resulted with his bloody head on the platter. It is the same void that leads to greed and overconsumption prevalent in our American culture. The whole piece is meant to take you from outside the home to within the home making the point that what is reflected on the outside is what we harbor on the inside (If we’re rotted on the outside, we’re rotted on the inside). The stars and stripes embedded into the the resin sat under the pig’s head during the photographing of the triptych White Privilege as it decayed over the course of a two-week period. While photographing The Beauty of Decay, a considerable amount of American flags were found abandoned in the homes. The thirteen stars are reflective of the beginnings of American culture and greed.

Susan Aurinko / Misha Goro

Susan Aurinko’s glamorous photographs represent an imagined representation of St. Petersburg, Russia by depicting the seductive symbols of European chic. Misha Goro’s view, as a native of St Petersburg, is somewhat grittier. Both impressions are correct, as they show the two sides of a post-Soviet Russian reality. For their pieces, Goro screen-printed Aurinko’s photographs of female faces and building facades onto aluminum. These photos became the starting point for Goro, who then responded to the work with oil paint and chemical etching, creating a multi-layered effect.

Tami Bahat / Malka Nedivi

Tami Bahat and Malka Nedivi are Israeli artists living in Los Angeles. They met in 2015 at one of Nedivi’s shows and immediately felt a strong kinship.

Before collaborating, it was important for the two artists to consider why they felt so close, despite being a generation apart and living vastly different lives. One commonality stood out: both had family members killed in the Holocaust, and the members that did survive had their lives turned upside down. Their businesses and homes were taken from them and many fled to new countries, splintering the families in a multitude of ways. Feelings of loss and broken ancestry are deeply embedded in both artists, and the reverence for those that came before is sacrosanct.

Everyone has stories passed down through generations so as to never forget. Both artists have boxes of old photos, letters, documents, and other items that shed light into the lives of their parents, grandparents, and beyond. It isn’t just a cursory acknowledgment of ancestry, it is a moral imperative. Family first. Know where you came from. Learn from them. Nedivi and Bahat also feel a deep-seated compassion for all immigrants and hold onto hope for all of them to find their way and to firmly plant their roots anew, safely, and securely.

Clarissa Bonet / Natalie Krick

Clarissa Bonet and Natalie Krick’s collaboration was influenced by their long conversations about the function and perception of photography and their shared frustrations surrounding the historical canon of the medium. Over the past few months, they have passed photographs back and forth, altering the images with each exchange. For them, the click of the shutter is absolutely equal to and inseparable from any physical cutting, collaging, and digital manipulation. Bonet and Krick are drawn to the flattened image, which merges their own distinct visual voices while challenging the viewer to consider what they are looking at.

Kate Breakey / Stacey Forbes

Kate Breakey & Stacey Forbes collaborated to capture recent astronomical events: the total solar eclipse on August 21, 2017, and the total lunar eclipse on January 31, 2018. Although the sun is 400 times wider than the moon, because it is also 400 times farther away, it appears to be the same size. We happen to live in a period in earth’s history to experience this beautiful coincidence. Breakey photographed these celestial events and Forbes wrote the poems ‘Obscurata’, and ‘Blood Moon’ specifically to accompany the images.

Keith Carter / Cathy Spence

Working together for two decades, Keith Carter and Cathy Spence have often shared a mutual interest in the history of photography. They have envisioned a series of collaborative images that touch on the early practitioners of photography; men and women who have experimented and helped expand boundaries of both process and aesthetics. They have begun this series with Nadar as their starting point.

Matt Eich / Doug Van Gundy

Upon meeting each other in person, Matt Eich and Doug Van Gundy immediately fell into a rhythm of work, immersing themselves in the small mountain communities of Webster County, West Virginia. Van Gundy interviewed people about their lives and attitudes, and Eich made their portraits. They visited diners and senior centers, lumber mills and local stores, swimming holes and empty mining towns in our attempt to meet the people and the place on its own terms.

Van Gundy is not a professional photographer and Eich is not a poet. However, Eich’s photographs are lyrical and empathetic, seizing a moment that suggests a wider narrative. And Van Gundy is a poet with a deep love of the clear image, in whatever medium. Together, they are a pair of makers with complementary processes and a deep desire to see the people and world around them in a way that isn’t colored by sentiment, but affords our subjects the dignity that comes through nuance and complexity.

Stephen Eichhorn / Elaine C. Miller

Since Elaine Catherine Miller and Stephen Eichhorn live/work in neighborhoods distant from one another, their piece became about how two artists work together without physical contact with each other or with the outside world, a world where windows have become the proscenium for nature to carry on while the artists observe from their respective studios. Utilizing shared studio activities such as image collecting and manipulation and an understanding of working methodologies, the collaborative work developed intuitively. For this piece, Miller provided her photography and found materials for Eichhorn to further manipulate and re-contextualize. Eichhorn used found studio materials and specific image plates to flesh out the work in response to the material Miller provide.

Dan Estabrook / Nathan Carter

Dan Estabrook and Nathan Carter began with a challenge: a game of three moves. Start with one artist’s tintypes, then give them to another artist to destroy — creating something new — and bring them home to finish. What began as classically composed (if mildy pornographic) arrangements of fruits and flowers became intersexual botanical beings, a spiky, prideful panorama. The faces of kings and queens bloomed while petals, ovules, and stamens sprouted the limbs of old ghosts.

Terry Evans / Aimée Beaubien

Terry Evans and Aimée Beaubien met once before the lock down and very quickly landed on a bur oak tree as their subject. They took their time meandering around how their visualized gestures might come together to embrace this 300-year-old tree. A photo-montage grew to envision far reaching winter branches overhead with a sprawling root system underground. Photographs of the oak leaves that had been collected at the Wooded Island (the site of the bur oak tree) fall from crown to taproot. All is connected with a netted system conveying our ties to the essential contributions trees make to our ecosystem.

Jed Fielding / Elizabeth McGowan

The quote “See Naples and Die” by Johann Goethe is particularly poignant. After visiting Naples and experiencing such great beauty, Goethe felt that there could be no further reason to live. The quote has taken on new meaning: the city is gorgeous, but there is the threat of crime, poverty, pollution, La Camorra (the Neapolitan Mafia), and the ever-present threat of Vesuvius’s eruptions (Italy’s most active volcano). This piece combines the artists’ memories and deep emotional attachment to the city and people of Naples, where they have been traveling to and working in for over 40 years.

Doug Fogelson / Monika Müller

Superimposed is a collaborative work synthesizing interpretations of a mountain range in the Bernese Alps of Switzerland near the Rosenlaui Glacier Gorge, a place well known to Monika Müller (who is based in Switzerland) who recommended Doug Fogelson visit the area. After photographing natural vistas, Fogelson applied chemicals to his analog film to partially remove the imagery. A selection of those altered images were then printed and expanded upon by Müller via drawing in graphite. The process for each artist fluctuates between personal memories of such a dramatic natural area and their own methods of generating (or removing) representational and abstract aspects of that experience.

Michael Kenna / Maki Ishiwata

Maki Ishiwata’s handmade paper (Washi) was created in Niigata, a snow country, where the Washi was naturally bleached in the snow. The UV rays of the sun and the moisture of the snow create a beautiful, lush color. Michael Kenna’s monochrome photograph brings forth the essential and simple beauty that lies beneath the Washi. Michael decided on the shooting location spontaneously in the uncontrollable climate and time. Nature seemed to lead Michael to the right location. This collaboration between the deep snow of Hokkaido and the Washi flower born in the snow was truly a fantastic experiment. It was an unforgettable moment in the silent snow country.

Michael Kenna / Ellen O'Connell

Ellen O’Connell and Michael Kenna have been friends for more than twenty years, meeting while living in San Francisco. Since then, they have had many meetings-of-the-mind over a glass of wine in London, Paris, Milan, New York and Zürich. Curiosity was O’Connell’s first reaction when the possibility of working with Kenna arose. How to collaborate on a single piece from a distance, with Kenna in the U.S. and O’Connell in Switzerland? Michael Kenna put forth the proposition and set a theme, transparence, and provided images for O’Connell to explore. She coupled Kenna’s iconic winter trees in Japan with an image she had taken with her Holga camera of sand dunes in Egypt, juxtaposing not only different seasons, but cultures, moods, and photographic techniques. The resulting image embodies a union of contradictions.

Michael Koerner / Jae Green

Jae Green, a poet and adult survivor of cancer, and Michael Koerner, an alternative/historic process photographer and activist against nuclear proliferation, have combined their talents to produce a collaborative, multimedia installation titled, Echo Genetic. Green incorporated her childhood sensory experiences with moments of Socratic thought and adult survivorship into Koerner’s experimental photographic chemigram work. Their collaboration resulted in a combination of poetry and photochemistry (chemigram over Japanese sumi inkblot décalquer) on tintype plates displayed on a vintage, medical X-ray visualizer.

Over the weeks of collaboration, the pair discovered increasingly more about each other. There were many moments of matching, repeating, it was like two kids bouncing a rubber ball between them. Yeah, you too? Yup, me too. The piece took shape under questions and disclosures. They listened; there was an echo. Mothers and fathers and the things that grow in secret.Ally-ship with one’s own stubborn, willful body. Light, both literal and figurative. Cognition and the sometimes terribleness of realizing how very dark it was in their lack of understanding. The infantilizing process of learning. And finally, simply, that you can’t escape your history, anymore than you can escape your own blood. Like opening a schoolbook; there’s a view of what’s going on with you, lit up in the doctor’s office, so you can get a real good look at it. Listen, another echo.

Jin Lee / Calvin Forbes

Every Season was inspired by walks in Humboldt Park in the spring of 2020. As the pandemic locked down most of Chicago, Jin Lee would drive to the park every few days to walk, listen to birds, and admire trees. When she showed the photographs of trees to poet Calvin Forbes, he recalled the first line from the poem Trees by Joyce Kilmer: “I think I shall never see a poem, As lovely as a tree”. He then wrote a short poem to go with the photograph.

Jin Lee / Melissa Oresky

“Trees smell good, feel good, sound good, and look good. And as if that weren’t enough, they point beyond themselves.” Robert Adams, Along Some Rivers: Photographs and Conversation by Robert Adams

For Jin Lee, looking at Oresky’s beautiful collaged paintings of trees allowed her to consider the photographs not something she arrives at, but rather a starting point. The act of taking the scissors and cutting into the photograph was liberating for her; something she has never done before. She cut along the shape of the tree, separating it from the background, cutting it further into fragments, losing a sense of time and watching the pile grow. The collaboration was a circular process, one move leading to another, like an improvisational dance.

For Melissa Oresky, she noticed things she would not have otherwise seen without Lee’s intricate tree photographs as starting points. First, the textures and subtle colors of bark, then the ways these trees reinforce her experience of space as divided; opening above and solidifying below the horizon. The trunk is a barrier, producing a left and right, but also has its own interiority. Trees endure wounds and galls without seeming to suffer. They have skin and dendrites and orifices. They are bodily and individual.
She wonders, can we see trees beyond our ideas and uses of them? Can painting and photography ask this question in different ways, perhaps together?

Ysabel LeMay / Barbara FG

Ysabel LeMay and Barbara FG’s connection was a moment of serendipity. As a young French artist, FG moved to Austin, Texas in 2014 to study photography. It didn’t take long for LeMay to notice her talent. Her fearless experiments with different media and her joie de vivre captured LeMay’s curiosity, who later became her mentor. She soon learned that FG is a classically trained musician from the prestigious Regional Conservatory of Paris, has toured with international known musicians such as Alejandro Escovedo, and has photographed musical celebrities. LeMay advised FG on editing and refining her “100 portraits” series – photos of people who had crossed her path and who had made an impact on her life since she has lived in the US. Together, they spent hours looking in detail at facial expressions, searching to reveal the true personality behind the veil of persona. Through this process, FG opened LeMay’s eyes to the art of portraiture.

Arno Rafael Minkkinen / Chehalis Deane Hegner

The ground rules are simple. Without consultation, Arno Rafael Minkkinen & Chehalis Deane Hegner sent each other three photographs representing the first third, the second third, and the last third of their respective careers. They each wrote about the photographs without consulting or editing each other’s words. The photographs are square in format and placed within 8 x 10 film holders. The texts are adhered to the exposed indicator side of the of the dark side.

Andrea Modica / Alice Lichtenstein

For several years, Alice Lichtenstein has been working on prose poems and micro-fictions on women’s relationships to their breasts. This subject came out of an invitation to participate in a fundraising event for the YWCA in Troy, New York to purchase new bras for women who could not afford them. A bra has more power than it seems. It is necessary for employment. It triggers an emotional experience for the wearer—shame, fear, confusion, joy--an undergarment, hidden, yet visible. When Andrea Modica showed Alice Lichtenstein her photograph of the white bra, Lichtenstein was inspired to write, Joanne’s Breasts. Their collaboration--Modica’s evocative image, Lichtenstein’s words--tells one aspect of a complex and important story.

Carlos Javier Ortiz / Michael Genovese

This piece is a sculptural object with 185 photographic images and illustrated texts that are printed on bond paper and “Chicago bound” to a wall mounted steel armature. The work is designed to invite the viewer to participate by removing the prints, revealing new work beneath to complete the work. The content includes over 150 images of screen-shots by Michael Genovese of Carlos Javier Ortiz’s archive from the past 15 years, creating a collection of new images. In addition, Genovese illustrates a poem by Ortiz with handwritten text titled Fresh Fruit.

Robert ParkeHarrison / John Galt

Constellation, a poetic sculptural piece by Robert ParkeHarrison and John Galt, is based in a surreal state of mind. A smaller-than-life sculpted head gently rests on silken fabric. A faint impression of a cloud filled sky appears on the cloth. Wildly patterned butterflies take flight, gracefully rising up to the heavens, yet tethered by red string. Constellation is grounded in a landscape of dreams, both ethereal and macabre. The meaning of the work is unlocked by contemplation and pure imagination.

Shana ParkeHarrison / Carl Landa

Shana ParkeHarrison’s video is set to a sound scape by Carl Landa. The video mimics wallpaper; allowing the viewer to watch for a bit, then move away, returning to a new experience. It invites you to come and go, as interesting developments catch your eye; compelling you to ponder for a bit, but never requiring your full attention.

Colleen Plumb / Katherine Kassouf Cummings

Expressed through photography, sculpture, video, and writing, Colleen Plumb & Katherine Kassouf Cummings’ collaboration invites an examination of our relationship to the invisible that exists all around us. An image slowly breathes, appearing and disappearing: a color photograph of a raw wing bone from a chicken. This photograph “breathes” on a plaster-cast sculpture of a chicken wing. The photograph moves our eyes beneath the surface of the wing, into the interior, uplifting what’s invisible. Flanking the wing are chalk white bones cast from a chicken bone. This delicate line of bones mirrors the physical experience of workers in a slaughterhouse, standing in compact rows. As the photograph bone breathes, we are invited to join the artist in an act of witnessing the chickens and the workers, together subjected to the suffering created by our industrial food system. Alongside the bones hangs a newsprint poster, bound into a pad affixed to the wall, with writings attending to the question of what makes the invisible visible. Prints can be torn from the wall, and viewers of this work are invited to absorb the writings, to take the stories with them and carry the practice out into the world.

David Schalliol / Amanda Williams

20-16-215-002-0000, the Cook County Parcel Identification Number for the site featured in this collaboration.

The two artists’ conceptual and geographic overlap is embodied in this piece. David Schalliol first photographed the site in October 2007 while working on Isolated Building Studies, and continued photographing the location, including in 2014 and 2016. Amanda Williams transformed the site during the Chicago Architectural Biennial in October 2015, painting the house “Flamin’ Red Hots” orange as the eighth and final installment of her project. Directly in conversation, the artists highlight how race, class, and cultural memory are manifested in changing place.

The work’s title directs attention to the state apparatus that defines and regulates the physical environment. Despite the seeming neutrality of parcel numbers, the way they define property is tied to the long history of conflict over land, from colonization to the intentional devaluation of Chicago’s South Side through such policies as redlining.

Brad Temkin / Laurie Lambrecht

These pieces came out of the friendship between Brad Temkin & Laurie Lambrecht and their aligned philosophy of humanity’s relationship with nature. Our impact on the natural world can be seen in many ways, but Temkin and Lambrecht have chosen to celebrate the positivity of our impact by imagining unspoken transformations.

Sonja Thomsen / Thom Bridge

Sonja Thomsen and Thom Bridge were first brought together when they shared space in the summer exhibition Photography is Magic at Aperture in 2016. They have been in communication across the ocean ever since and are so pleased to use this as an opportunity to collaborate for the first time. Working between London and Wisconsin, the pair sees the framework of archipelagos as a metaphor for the synergy in their practices, separated yet connected underneath the surface. Coincidentally, the Stockholm archipelago is a geography that has radiant personal histories for both of these lens-based artists who look to tease the elasticity of memory and photographic material.

Using their own rock collections from the Baltic, Lake Michigan, and the English Channel as source material, the pair has been passing images back and forth to each other, working both into and onto one another. In their piece pool, Thomsen and Bridge have constructed a new topography revealed from months in quarantine.

Sonja Thomsen / Linda Connor

Having studied and worked with Linda Connor at the San Francisco Art Institute during her graduate studies, Sonja Thomsen claims Connor as one of her consequential mentors. In our reflecting, Thomsen and Connor’s images are presented as daguerreotypes. The custom-made stand positions the two pieces in such a way that reflect the images onto each other; a physical manifestation of their relationship.

Ron van Dongen / Douglas Wurster

The idea for this (Rembrandt) portrait is based on the black-on-black floral still lives that Ron van Dongen photographed 25 years ago. Douglas Wurster has been a collaborator (and model) for van Dongen on several occasions and he created a replica of a 17th Century frame commonly used at the time. Subsequently, Ron made a portrait specifically tailored to that frame, hence the square ‘collar’.

Alex Webb / Rebecca Norris Webb

Waves is the start of a creative conversation between Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb; a collaborative exploration that’s part visual voyage, part lyrical logbook that uses words and images on Cape Cod during the first wave of the coronavirus.

Jeffrey Wolin / Jennifer Greenburg

How does one make a body of compelling images from inside the home and connect it with another? Jeffrey Wolin and Jennifer Greenburg were not sure they could. There would be no in-person meetings for the foreseeable future, and they were both sheltering in place. The obstacle of collaborative work, done without the ability to meet, had to be overcome. At first, they thought that they would both take one photograph each hour on a given day, but it quickly became clear that synchronicity was impossible.

They met via Zoom every week while mostly making photographs by ourselves in isolation. When they began sharing images with one another, they were pleasantly surprised to discover how many seemed to pair up; they were having a symbiotic experience. Without prior discussion, they had both photographed The Blue Angels fly-over in Chicago on May 12, 2020, to honor health care providers. It seemed unbelievable that we had both caught that moment within seconds of one another. Serendipity was apparently easier to achieve than synchronicity.

Their work is presented in a form that resembles a traditional contact sheet made from a 24-exposure roll of film, referencing the role contact sheets have played in the lives of past image-makers who used the sheets to decide which images to print. They hope that this nod to the history of photography would provide an element of irony, given that they are both using medium format digital cameras with virtually unlimited exposures.

Catherine Edelman Gallery opens with an exciting collaborative exhibition:
“Photography & _____”

Catherine Edelman Gallery is excited to open its doors with the first artist collaborative exhibition in its 32+ history, “Photography & _____.” The show opens July 10 and runs through September 4, 2020. To avoid crowds, the opening reception will be from noon – 7:00 pm on Friday, July 10. Many artists will be in attendance throughout the day.

Most art making is a solitary process, void of outside voices, as a blank piece of paper or canvas is transformed into a work of art. But there has always been a rich history of art collectives: a group of artists who collaborate to create work. In the spirit of these collectives, Catherine Edelman Gallery presents “Photography & _____,” an exhibition that brings together photographers and other creatives to create one-of-a-kind pieces. CEG invited artists familiar to the gallery, including painters, writers and photographers, and asked each participant to reach out to a fellow artist to create a collaborative piece. There were no limitations placed on the work, except that photography must be incorporated into each piece.

The concept for “Photography & _____” started late last year, before anyone had heard of Covid-19. It now seems prophetic that after being closed for ten weeks, our first exhibition post stay-at-home is about collaboration. With everyone isolated at home, most of the participating artists relied on Zoom, Skype, and phone calls to create works of art. We are thrilled with the results, and thank the 30+ artists who are part of the exhibition.

Alanna Airitam, photographer / Wayne Martin Belger, photographer

Susan Aurinko, photographer / Misha Goro, painter, printmaker

Tami Bahat, photographer / Malka Nedivi, mixed media artist

Clarissa Bonet, photographer / Natalie Krick, artist

Kate Breakey, photographer / Stacey Forbes, poet

Keith Carter, photographer / Cathy Spence, photographer

Matt Eich, photographer / Doug Van Gundy, poet

Stephen Eichhorn, multidisciplinary artist / Elaine C. Miller, multidisciplinary artist

Dan Estabrook, photographer / Nathan Carter, sculptor, artist

Terry Evans, photographer / Aimée Beaubien,installation artist

Jed Fielding, photographer / Elizabeth McGowan, artist

Doug Fogelson, photographer / Monika Müller, artist

Michael Kenna, photographer / Maki Ishiwata, washi fiber artist

Michael Kenna, photographer / Ellen O’Connell, photographer

Michael Koerner, photographer / Jae Green, poet and performer

Jin Lee, photographer / Melissa Oresky, painter

Jin Lee, photographer / Calvin Forbes, writer

Ysabel LeMay, photographer / Barbara FG, photographer

Sandro Miller, photographer / Patricia Smith, poet

Arno Rafael Minkkinen, photographer / Chehalis Deane Hegner, multidisciplinary artist

Andrea Modica, photographer / Alice Lichtenstein, writer

Carlos Javier Ortiz, photographer / Michael Genovese, visual artist

Shana ParkeHarrison, photographer / Carl Landa, composer, musician

Robert ParkeHarrison, photographer / John Galt, sculptor

Colleen Plumb, photographer, installation artist / Katherine Kassouf Cummings, writer

David Schalliol, photographer / Amanda Williams, photographer

Fred Stonehouse, painter / Anonymous, photographer
Brad Temkin, photographer / Laurie Lambrecht, artist

Sonja Thomsen, artist / Linda Connor, photographer

Sonja Thomsen, artist / Thom Bridge, artist

Ron van Dongen, photographer / Douglas Wurster, carpenter and landscape architect

Alex Webb, photographer / Rebecca Norris Webb, photographer

Jeffrey Wolin, photographer / Jennifer Greenburg, photographer

Questioning generalized stereotypes and lack of fair and equal representation of people of color in art spaces has led artist Alanna Airitam to research critical historical omissions and how those contrived narratives represent and influence succeeding generations. Her photographic series The Golden Age, Crossroads, White Privilege, and individual works such as Take a Look Inside and How to Make a Country ask the viewer to question who they are and how they choose to be seen. Airitam’s portraits and vanitas are photographed in studio with minimal lighting giving the work a painterly quality that captures the attention with beauty to deliver challenging messages. The Golden Age series is hand-varnished while Crossroads, Take a Look Inside and How to Make a Country are encased in resin and placed in hand-welded frames creating unique objects. All works are produced by the artist in limited editions. Her photographs have been exhibited at Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago, Quint Gallery in San Diego, San Diego Art Institute, Art Miami, Athenaeum Art Center in San Diego, and Candela Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. Born and raised in Queens, New York, Airitam now resides in Tucson, Arizona.

Susan Aurinko has shown her photography in solo exhibitions in France, Italy, and India, as well as in the US. Her exhibition about India, entitled Still Point India, is now available as a book, as is Searching for Jehanne – The Joan Of Arc Project, which has been shown in both galleries and museums. Aurinko’s work appears on several book covers, including The Stranger Among Us, Ariel, Scar Tissue, Bound and Broken, and Slut Lullabies, in the US and UK, and four of her photographs are included in the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s permanent collection as well as the collections of The Union League Club of Chicago and The Loyola University Museum of Art. Her photographs hang in private collections in France, Italy, India, Monaco, the UK, and the US.

Tami Bahat is a fine art photographer from Tel Aviv, Israel. Raised by a former dancer and a graphic artist, Bahat’s family resettled in Los Angeles when she was a child. Championed by parents who encouraged her artistic expression, Bahat experimented in various media, finding her voice as well as her place in the world. Most recently, her work has been exhibited at photography events internationally, including Fotofever (Paris), AAF New York and Hong Kong, as well as the LA Art Show. Bahat was selected as a Critical Mass finalist in 2016 and invited to attend Review Santa Fe 2017. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

Aimée Beaubien is an artist living and working in Chicago. Her cut-up photographic collages, photo-based installations and artists’ books explore collapses in time, space and place, while engaging the complexities of visual perception. Beaubien’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Beaubien is an Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL where she received her MFA in 1993.

Wayne Martin Belger is an unconventional fine art photographer that uses historical artifacts and processes as his medium to make intricate functional 4”x5” cameras that are hand-tooled from blocks of metal, and used to engage with underserviced communities, highlighting current social and humanitarian issues. As a student of linguistics and comparative religion Belger followed a path to explore the roots of beliefs, passions and truths as told through alternative and historic forms of communication. Since 1998, Wayne has created fifteen camera/photo projects focusing on subjects like the Abrahamic religions, corporate greed and HIV. Projects have taken him to India, Israel, Palestinian Territories, Syria, Kashmir, Turkey, the refugee camps of Lesbos Greece, Mexico City, Tijuana, Standing Rock, ND during the Sioux/DAPL stand-off in 2016 and most recently with the “Us & Them” project Wayne lived and traveled with indigenous Zapatista rebels in Chiapas, Mexico. Belger’s ornate multi-media installations include the custom project camera, large analog prints and relevant artifacts from shoot locations. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. Much of his work lives in permanent museum collections in the U.S. and private collections globally. Wayne’s work has been featured in many magazines and newspapers such as LA Times Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, Juxtapoz Magazine, PhotoPro Magazine, Black + White Photography, and Popular Mechanics. Wayne works and lives in a converted 1930’s diaper washing factory in the dusty border town of Tucson, Arizona.

Clarissa Bonet is an artist based in Chicago whose work explores issues of the urban space in both a physical and psychological context. She holds an MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago and a BS in Photography from the University of Central Florida. Bonet’s work has been exhibited at the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, Aperture Foundation, Magenta Foundation, and Catherine Edelman Gallery. Her work has been published in The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, CNN Photo, Chicago Magazine, Juxtapoz, Aint-Bad, and many other publications. Bonet’s photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Southeast Museum of Photography, Haggerty Museum of Art, University Club Chicago, and the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection.

Kate Breakey was born in Adelaide, South Australia and moved to the United States in 1988. Her work is part of numerous private and public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, TX), Museum of Photographic Arts (San Diego, CA) and Austin Museum of Art (Austin, TX).

Thom Bridge (b 1987) is a Swedish British artist interested in the dualities, translations and movement of images as well as the mechanics and languages of photography. This manifests through the practices and display of print-making, sculpture and installation. In the on-going collaboration T. Bridge with his identical twin, Theo, the pair seek to question their shared image-identity by declaring that twins are in fact photography.

Keith Carter grew up in a small delta town on the Louisiana border, raised by his mother who worked as the local portrait photographer in Beaumont, Texas. Years later, Carter began his own photographic career, capturing the people and spirituality of the Southern landscape in which he was raised. Carter is among an increasing list of artists working in the South whose photographs reveal a people and place so often fictionalized in literature. He has emerged as one of the most respected artists among this group whose commitment to the people and places of Southeast Texas is unparalleled.

Nathan Carter was born in 1970 in Dallas TX, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York where he makes films, music, sculptures, collages, drawings, party dresses, jewelry, hats and costumes. He is represented in New York City by Casey Kaplan, Esther Schipper in Berlin and The Baldwin Gallery in Aspen Colorado.

Linda Connor lives and works in San Francisco, California. Connor has had a long and distinguished career in photography and has traveled extensively to produce her work to places such as India, Turkey, Peru, Iceland, and Southeast Asia. Her work has been the subject of several monographs including: On the Music of the Spheres (Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996); Luminance (Woodrose, 1994); and Spiral Journey (Columbia College, 1990). A compendium of her work, Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor (Chronicle Books, 2008) includes over thirty years of photographs and was accompanied by a nationally traveling exhibition. Connor’s peripatetic practice demonstrates a longstanding interest in the relationship between systems of belief and the natural world, and has seen her photographing wide-ranging subjects, from sacred sites and intricately jagged cliff faces, to antique plate-glass negatives from San Jose’s Lick Observatory and petrified bodies from the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in Pompeii. She has recently begun printing some of her most iconic images as shimmering sublimation prints on aluminum plates, lending an ethereal quality to already exquisite prints.

Katherine Kassouf Cummings is a daughter, a sister, a friend, a teacher, an ecological citizen, and a writer. She is co-editor of the forthcoming book What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? (University of Chicago Press, 2021). She serves as Managing Editor at the Center for Humans and Nature, an organization that engages in publication and land-based practice to explore and promote ethics in humans and nature relationships.

Matt Eich is a photographic essayist working on long-form projects related to memory, family, community, and the American condition. Matt’s work has received numerous recognitions, including PDN’s 30 Emerging Photographers to Watch, the Joop Swart Masterclass, the F25 Award for Concerned Photography, and POYi’s Community Awareness Award. His projects have received grant support from an Aaron Siskind Fellowship, a VMFA Fellowship and two Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography. His work has been exhibited in 20 solo shows, in addition to numerous festivals and group exhibitions.

Stephen Eichhorn (b. 1984, United States) lives and works in Chicago. He has had solo exhibitions at the Franklin Park Conservatory, Elmhurst Art Museum and the Chicago Athletic Association. His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Tower Hill Botanic Gardens, the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, NEIU Fine Arts Center Gallery, Illinois State Museum Lockport Gallery and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Stephen Eichhorn is represented by Carrie Secrist Gallery.

For almost thirty years, Dan Estabrook has been making contemporary art using the photographic techniques and processes of the nineteenth century. Estabrook has exhibited widely and has received several awards, including an Artist's Fellowship from the NEA in 1994. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

The prairie ecosystem has been a guide for Terry Evans since 1978. She photographs the prairies and plains of North America, the urban prairie of Chicago and other landscapes. Combining both aerial and ground photography, she delves into the intricate and complex relationships between land and people, especially advocating for the land itself and for local people who suffer environmental racism and injustice. She currently photographs ancient protected prairies and a particular Bur Oak in Jackson Park, Chicago. Evans has exhibited widely and her work is in many museum collections. She has five books, including Heartland: The Photographs of Terry Evans and Prairie Stories. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of an Anonymous is a Woman award.

Barbara FG was born in La Rochelle and lived in l’île de Ré on the west coast of France where she studied classical music for 19 years, graduating from the conservatory of Paris. In 2014 she moved to Austin, Texas where she completed a Bachelor of Fine Art in photography. Barbara is presently working on a book revealing a one hundred portrait series of people who have made an impact in her life since moving to the U.S. As well she is working as a portrait photographer and video artist while touring nationally as a professional musician.

Jed Fielding was born in Boston in 1953. He received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975, where he studied with Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan, and his MFA from The Art Institute of Chicago in 1980. He has photographed extensively in Peru, Greece, Egypt, Spain, France, Mexico, and the United States, and has been photographing in Italy for over forty years. Fielding’s photographs have been widely collected and exhibited, and are represented in private and public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, California; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Art Institute of Chicago; International Center of Photography, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and The Goldman Sachs Collection, New York.

Doug Fogelson studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College Chicago. His works are exhibited with esteemed galleries and museums and included in collections such as The J. Paul Getty Center, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Center for Creative Photography, and Staatliche Museum für Fotografie. He has been recognized by The Brooklyn Rail, Photo District News, and AfterImage among others. Doug Fogelson founded and directed Front Forty Press, an independent publishing imprint, has taught in the Photography Department of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and currently serves as President of the Board for Filter Photo.

Calvin Forbes is a poet and Professor Emeritus at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught classes Jazz and Blues History and Creative Writing. Jazz musicians Kurt Elling and Branford Marsalis on their 2016 Grammy nominated CD Upward Spiral recorded his poem, “Momma Said”, originally published in Poetry Magazine. He also curated the music for We Will Walk—Art and Resistance in the American South for Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK, 2020.

Born on April 16, 1969, in Towanda, Pennsylvania, Stacey Forbes writes poignant, lyrical poems and essays that comment on the human condition – and the natural world we share. Speaking always with honesty, empathy and an abiding sense of wonder, she gives voice to the divine spark in everything. Forbes’ work has been published in The Adirondack Review, Conspire Magazine, and Stirring: A Literary Collection. Honors include Friends of Acadia in 2000. She currently works as marketing manager for Roche Tissue Diagnostics in Tucson, Arizona, where she uses her storytelling craft to author and art direct multimedia narratives on the role of personalized diagnostics in modern medicine.

John Galt is an American sculptor that works primarily in bronze and wood. Galt earned an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and teaches sculpture at Skidmore College.

Michael Genovese (American, b. 1976, Chicago, IL) is a contemporary visual artist. He creates work that aims to connect with collective experiences, be it social or existential. Each project can be as much a documentation of broad themes as a personal journal. He speaks to the familiar, however, through mark making, reduction, or transformation of the recognizable, he reassigns power. He is not eliminating evidence or obscuring facts, but instead he re-contextualizes our perception of meaning and history. His work is about archives, permanence, and the designation of value. His concern with materiality, and the treatment of his chosen media, furthers the investigation of worth. His particular approach, and the work’s content, move to alter our preconceptions and change our proximity to what is tangible.

Misha Goro, a prominent painter, printmaker and educator, has lived and worked in Russia, Europe, Israel, and the U.S. He received an M.F.A. in printmaking from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Currently he holds the position of Chairperson of the Graphics Department at the American Academy of Art in Chicago. Goro has won a number of prestigious international awards in Europe, Asia, and the United States and has taught Master Classes and done Artist Residencies in China, Russia, Italy, Belgium, and the UK. His work has been exhibited in over a hundred national and international shows and hangs in multiple public and private collections.

Jae Green is a poet, second generation artist, mother and cancer survivor originally from the South side of Chicago. Her poetry can be found in anthologies such as Tia Chucha's "Open Fist", "Smithsonian Magazine", "Hand Over Hand Magazine" "Antirrhinum Journal" and "Voices from the Heartland". She has performed at The Green Mill, Randolph Street Gallery, Uncommon Ground, The Chicago Cultural Center, WomanMade Gallery, The Chicago Poetry Fest, Metro, Around the Coyote, and The Catherine Edelman Gallery. In 2017 she founded a small family creative workshop that's come to be known as "Either/Neither". For 2018 she participated in BodyPassages, a year-long collaboration between the Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble and The Chicago Poetry Center. In 2020 projects with The Art Institute and Anysquared were cancelled or postponed due to COVID-19. Jae was raised by an artist. And her first memories were of her Old Man pointing out some piece of beauty, oddness or funkiness tucked into the everyday around them.Those moments and her own hijinx in unexpected Mamahood inform her practice. Ms.Green is particularly fascinated by history, childhood, repetitions, Americana, religious myth and dogma, resurrection and the fluidity of identity.

Jennifer Greenburg is a contemporary artist who works with photographic imagery. She holds an MFA from The University of Chicago and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute. Solo shows of her work have been held at The Print Center, Philadelphia, and The Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago. Greenburg’s work has been part of numerous international group shows including The Museum of Contemporary Photography at 40. She was an artist in residence at Light Work, Syracuse, and is a recipient of two Illinois Arts Council Grants. Her work is part of the permanent collection of The Houston Museum of Contemporary Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Museum of Photographic Arts, Light Work, The Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Ontario.

Chehalis Deane Hegner is a discipline fluid artist named in the 2018 and 2020 Julia Margaret Cameron Awards. Recipient of the Gjion Mili Photography Prize in 2010 (Kosovo), her portraits have been featured in Christie’s and Phillips catalogs. Solo and group exhibitions in the US and Europe include: The Griffin Museum (MA), Photographic Resource Center (Boston), Art Institute of Boston, Maryland Art Place (Baltimore), St. Gauden’s National Historic Site (Cornish, NH), The Cultural Center (Varigotti, Italy), Perspective Gallery (Evanston, IL), Interlochen Arts Academy (MI), the MIT Museum (Cambridge, MA) The Rey Center; curated by Vicki Goldberg (Waterville Valley, NH), University of Massachusetts (Lowell), University of Texas (Austin), Institute of Contemporary Art (Portland, ME) and the National Gallery of Art in Kosovo. In 2005 Hegner received her MFA in Photography at Lesley University College of Art and Design (Cambridge, MA). She served as photography faculty at University of Massachusetts in the College of Art and Design until 2015. Hegner has held positions on jury panels, teaches photo workshops, is a member of ASMP and past member of SPE. Currently, Chehalis is co-founding director at Halo Hill, a new cultural arts organization northwest of Chicago. She has served on nonprofit boards including The Photographic Resource Center (Boston University) and the Hegner Family Foundation and was recently appointed to the Arts Commission in Woodstock, IL.

Maki Ishiwata was born in Chiba Prefecture, Japan. She received a BFA degree at the San Francisco Art Institute in California, USA, and then worked as an art instructor at California elementary and middle schools for thirteen years. During her twenty-four years in America she explored her potential in various creative fields. In 2007 she returned to Japan where she has lived and worked since. Greatly influenced by her mother, who dedicated her life to the heritage of traditional Japanese handmade paper, (Washi), Maki became deeply charmed by the beauty of this paper and started to create her original “plant figures” using Washi. She subsequently developed her singular style using a technique involving a ligature and paper strings. Through her Washi art, Maki uses her distinctive Japanese sense of esthetics to bring traditional Washi to a global audience. Her works have been exhibited in galleries and museums in Japan and USA.

With more than fifty monographs documenting his travels, Michael Kenna shows no signs of slowing down in his endless pursuit of nature's haunting beauty. Whether working in his native England, Easter Island, the coastal towns of France or the islands in Japan, Kenna seeks places of solitude which speak volumes about humanity. Barren seascapes, abandoned fishing nets, fragmented piers, mysterious horizons, trees emerging from under snow drifts – these are just some of the images which dominate Michael Kenna's work from Japan. The result of his efforts can be seen in two books, Hokkaido (2006) and Japan (2002), both published by Nazraeli Press.

Michael Koerner (Okinawa, Japan, 1963) is the oldest of five brothers. Due to genetic abnormalities and cancer, he is the only remaining living son. His brothers' fates (and potentially his own one day) can be linked to their mother, who was eleven years old on August 9, 1945 when the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. She lived in Sasebo, Japan, 45 miles away from the blast. The long-term effects of severe, acute exposure to gamma radiation led to his mother’s death at an early age, and all of his brothers. Koerner’s work explores his family history and genetics through small tintypes, using photographic chemistry to assimilate the bursts and biochemical fallout from the atom bomb.

Natalie Krick holds a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago. Her work has recently been exhibited at SF Camerawork, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Aperture Foundation and Blue Sky Gallery. Her photographs have been highlighted in several international publications including BOMB, Vogue Italia, The New Yorker, PDN, Aperture and Vrij Nederland. She was awarded the Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2017 and was a recipient of an Individual Photographer's Fellowship from the Aaron Siskind Foundation in 2015. Natural Deceptions , her first book, was published by Skylark Editions in the Fall of 2017. Her photographs reside in the collection at the Museum of Contemporary Photography.

Laurie Lambrecht, a native of Bridgehampton, NY is a visual artist working in photography and fiber. She has had numerous solo exhibitions in the US and abroad. Her photographs are in the collection of museums including the National Gallery of Art, the Portland Art Museum, and the Center for Creative Photography. In the early 1990’s she worked as administrative assistant to Roy Lichtenstein simultaneously photographing the artist and his process. “Roy Lichtenstein in His Studio” the monograph of her project was published by Monacelli Press in 2011. She has worked with theatre artist Robert Wilson at the Watermill Center intermittently since 1993. From 20122014 Lambrecht photographed a documentary project of the Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida. Laurie’s own work is an observation of the natural world especially of trees and vegetation. In autumn of 2019 Laurie was a Road Show artist of the Parrish Museum and presented an outdoor installation at Madoo Garden Conservancy.

Carl Landa is a freelance composer based in Saratoga Springs, NY. He has composed for dance, film, stage, and galleries. He is the Director of Music for the Dance Department at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY.

Jin Lee is a Chicago based photographer whose project centers on forming a deeper relationship to places through close examination of landscapes and built environments. She has received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the Illinois Arts Council grant, and her works are included in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Madison Art Center, and Museum of Contemporary Photography. She is a Professor of Art at Illinois State University and is represented by Devening Projects in Chicago.

Since winning the New York KiptonART 2011 Rising Stars Program, the work of Austin, Texas-based artist Ysabel LeMay has seen more than 125 exhibitions around the globe and has been acquired for the corporate collections of Chevron, Bloomingdale’s and Bacardi, and the permanent collections at Museum of Photographic Arts and the Morris Museum. While her technique is high-tech, LeMay’s hypercollage process sees her traveling the globe on photographic expeditions, accumulating vast reserves of natural imagery. These she studiously reviews, extracting elements according to her intuition and assembling them into baroque tableaux venerating the undeniable majesty and generosity of nature. LeMay has brought her hypercollages to a place where they now serve as records of natural splendor perpetually in motion – as expressed by an artist who herself shows no interest in standing still.

Alice Lichtenstein graduated from Brown University and received her MFA from Boston University. She received a New York Foundation of the Arts Grant in Fiction and has twice been a fellow at The MacDowell Colony. Her novel, The Crime of Being (Upper Hand Press, 2019) was nominated for a 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, and has received many accolades. Her previous novels include: The Genius of the World (Zoland Books, 2000), and Lost (Scribner, 2010), a Finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Lichtenstein’s short stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prize Awards. Her recent work includes, Boob Song (BraVa! Anthology, 2020) and Revision (Winter, 2019, Narrative Magazine’s Story of the Week). Alice lives in Oneonta, New York, where she teaches fiction-writing at Hartwick College, and in Surry, Maine.

Elizabeth McGowan was born in New York City in 1956. She received her BFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1978, and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute in 1984. From 1977 through 1978 she participated in the RISD European Honors Program in Rome, Italy. She has travelled extensively in Italy, France, Spain, and Mexico, and currently divides her time between North Carolina and Chicago. Her work consists of mixed media, painting, collage, photography, and drawing.

Elaine Catherine Miller (b. 1990, Nashville, TN) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Chicago, IL. Elaine received her BFA in Photography from Memphis College of Art in 2012 and MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2015. Elaine’s work has been featured in numerous publications, held within public and private collections, and shown nationally and internationally, as well as online. Through the use of photography interwoven with analog and digital collage techniques, Elaine’s artistic practice explores and addresses themes of artifice and mediation with interest in how both nature and digital technology contrast and contribute to a contemporary consumerist culture.

At the age of sixteen, upon seeing the work of Irving Penn, Sandro Miller knew he wanted to become a photographer. Mostly self-taught, Sandro relied on books published by many of the great artists canonized in photographic history. Through their pictures, he learned the art of composition, lighting and portraiture. More than 30 years later, with clients ranging from Forbes, GQ and Esquire, to American Express, Coca-Cola and BMW, Sandro has secured his place as one of the top advertising photographers worldwide.

Arno Rafael Minkkinen was born in Helsinki in 1945, and moved to America when he was six. His work has been published, exhibited, and collected worldwide and is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Musée de l'Élysée (Lausanne), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris) and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, among many others. The artist is currently working on his eighth book, a chronology of five decades to be released in 2017.

Andrea Modica was born in New York City and lives in Philadelphia, where she works as a photographer and teaches in the Photography Program at Drexel University. A graduate of the Yale School of Art, she is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar. Her booksinclude Treadwell (Chronicle Books), Barbara (Nazraeli), Minor League (Smithsonian Press), Human Being (Nazraeli), Real Indians (Melcher Media), Fountain (Sintehour Editions), L’Amici del Cuore (Nazraeli), As We Wait (L’Artiere Editions – now in its second edition), January 1 (L’Artiere Editions), Lentini (Kris Graves Projects) and Reveal (Yoffy Press). Her upcoming book, which will be published with TIS, is titled Discipline Equestri.

Monika Müller was born in Lucerne Switzerland in 1969. She studied Art and Design at the University of Utah at the Department of Art and Architecture and at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Art, Department of Art and Design where she received her BA in 2000. She was Assistant Professor for Design and Art of the ETH Zürich, at the Department of Architecture with Professor Peter Jenny. Her work has been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions: Museum Bellerive, Zürich, the Museum of Art Lucerne, the GFJK Kunsthalle in Baden-Baden Germany, at the Dienstgebäude Zürich and at Goldfinch Gallery in Chicago. She has received the Cité des Arts residency in Paris, the Chicago studio residency from the Lucerne sister cities program, the Pfeifer Mobil travelling grant from the Otto Pfeifer Foundation and the artist book grant from the Canton and City of Lucerne. Müller is the Co-Founder of the Alpineum Produzentengalerie in Lucerne, Switzerland.

Malka Nedivi (b. 1952) is a mixed media artist and a documentary filmmaker. She was born in Rehovot, Israel to parents who survived the Holocaust and emigrated from Poland to Israel. She was their only child. Nedivi studied theater and literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1980 she moved to Los Angeles to study film at UCLA. Between 1987 and 1992 she worked as an assistant editor on numerous films for television. Around this time she also began to develop an immense passion for ceramics, sculpture and painting. Nedivi has had a variety of solo shows and has been featured in Los Angeles at the Skirball Cultural Center and LA Art Show. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband and family.

Born in Pennsylvania, USA, Ellen O'Connell moved with her family to the Bay Area when she was a toddler. Though she still considers San Francisco home, she has spent many years in New York and now lives with her husband and two children in Zürich, Switzerland. Ellen earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in international relations from San Francisco State University and a Master of Arts degree in arts and humanities from New York University. For nearly 30 years, Ellen has quietly pursued her personal creative journey, exploring painting, photography, and other forms of aesthetic and technical expression. Although she rarely uses a straightforward photographic approach in her artwork, preferring instead to experiment with multiple images, words, concepts and mediums, Ellen’s love of photography has remained constant. She has had work included in exhibitions at galleries in the US, the UK and Argentina.

Melissa Oresky’s art practice is rooted in painting and collage, and her primary production is mixed media works on canvas and paper. Her current work is focused broadly on plants. While looking at plants as direct subject matter for artworks, she also enacts what could be considered a “plantlike” process in the studio by “growing” paintings or collages through iterative processes, often over long periods of time. Oresky holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Awards include an Illinois Arts Council Artist’s Fellowship and a fellowship to attend Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME. Originally from Maryland, she lives and works in Normal, Illinois, where she is a Professor of Painting and Drawing at Illinois State University.

Carlos Javier Ortiz is a director, cinematographer and documentary photographer who focuses on urban life, gun violence, racism, poverty and marginalized communities. In 2016, Carlos received a Guggenheim Fellowship for film/video. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in a variety of venues including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts; the International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, NY and the Library of Congress. In addition, his photos were used to illustrate Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations (2014) Atlantic Magazine. His films "We All We Got" and "A Thousand Midnights" have screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, Los Angeles International Film Festival, AFI Film Festival, PBS Online Film Festival and Art Basel, Black and Blue, Stadtkino Basel cinema. Carlos Javier has taught at Northwestern University, the University of California, Berkeley and an undergraduate course workshop at the University of Chicago on the intersection of the arts and human rights. He lives in Chicago, IL and Berkeley, CA with his wife and Son and frequent collaborator, Tina K. Sacks, a professor of social welfare at the University of California, Berkeley.

Robert ParkeHarrison is most often found collaborating on photographic and sculptural works with Shana ParkeHarrison. His work has been exhibited internationally in group and solo exhibitions.

Shana ParkeHarrison is most often found collaborating on photographic and sculptural works with Robert ParkeHarrison. Her background in dance and her interest in peripheral vision combined to inform this video.

Colleen Plumb makes photographs, videos, and installations investigating systems that perpetuate power imbalances between humans and nonhuman animals. Her focus for over two decades has been an inquiry into a society whose appetite for animals, whether in flesh or in reproduction, with admiration or obsession, is voracious. Plumb’s recent projects explore the ways animals in captivity function as symbols of persistent colonial thinking, and how a striving for human domination over nature has been normalized. Her work sheds light on the lives of captive animals in order to bring attention to the implicit values of society as a whole, particularly those that perpetuate power imbalance and a tyranny of artifice. Her current project Form Align, of which this installation is a part, reflects upon the industrial food system and meatpacking industry through the bones and bodies of chickens.

David Schalliol is an associate professor of sociology at St. Olaf College who is interested in the relationship between community, social structure, and place. He exhibits widely, including in the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Centre Régional de la Photographie Hauts-de-France, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. His work has been supported by institutions including the Driehaus Foundation, the Graham Foundation, and BPS22 and been featured in publications including MAS Context, The New York Times, and Social Science Research. David is the author of Isolated Building Studies (UTAKATADO) and co-author, with Michael Carriere, of the forthcoming The City Creative (The University of Chicago Press). He rounds out his practice in documentary filmmaking, with contributions to Almost There (ITVS/Kartemquin Films), Cooked: Survival by Zip Code (Kartemquin Films), and Highrise: Out My Window (National Film Board of Canada), an interactive documentary that won an International Digital Emmy for Non-Fiction. His directorial debut, The Area (Scrappers Film Group), premiered at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in 2018.

Cathy Spence is a fine art photographer living and working in Beaumont, Texas. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1997 from Lamar University. Her current work brings to light the normal life of a boy with oculocutaneous albinism while focusing on the struggles of both albinism and adolescence. Cathy has photographs in the Wittliff Collection of Southwestern and Mexican Photography, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin. She was awarded the Houston Center of Photography Fellowship in 1998. Her work has been included in group shows: “Fotofest: New Discoveries,” PDNB Gallery, Dallas, Texas, 1998; “Will Power” Rudolph Poissant Gallery, Houston, Texas, 1998; “Nude,” PDNB Gallery, Dallas, Texas, 1999; “Braun, Francois, Spence, King,” Stephen L. Clark Gallery, Austin, Texas, 2001; and the traveling exhibition “Inside/Outside,” which showcased ten Texas women photographers selected by Anne Tucker, former curator of photography at MFAH. Her solo exhibitions “Saints and Satyrs” appeared at the Art Studio, Beaumont, Texas, 2000; and Stephen L. Clark Gallery, Austin, Texas, 2003.

Patricia Smith is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry, the 2017 LA Times Book Prize, the 2018 NAACP Image Award and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration ion with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, Life According to Motown; the children's book Janna and the Kings and the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House and in Best American Poetry and Best American Essays. Her contribution to the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir won the Robert L. Fish Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the best debut story of the year and was featured in the anthology Best American Mystery Stories.

Fred Stonehouse was born in 1960 in Milwaukee, WI. He received his BFA from UW Milwaukee in 1982. He had his first solo show in Chicago in 1983 and shows regularly in New York at Howard Scott Gallery and in Los Angeles with Koplin/DelRio. He has exhibited in Mexico, Amsterdam, Rome and Berlin. He has been the recipient of an NEA Arts Midwest Grant and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Individual Artists Grant. He is currently an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Wisconsin.

Brad Temkin (American, b.1956) is perhaps best known for his photographs of contemporary landscape. His work is held in numerous permanent collections, including those of The Art Institute of Chicago; Milwaukee Art Museum; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Ft Worth; and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, among others. His images have appeared in such publications as Aperture, Black & White Magazine, TIME Magazine and European Photography. He has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships including an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017. A monograph of Temkin’s work titled Private Places: Photographs of Chicago Gardens (Center for American Places) was published in 2005. Temkin’s second book titled ROOFTOP (Radius Books) was released Fall 2015, and most recently his third book, The State of Water (Radius Books) released in 2019. He has been an adjunct professor at Columbia College in Chicago since 1984.

Sonja Thomsen (b. 1978) is an American artist whose multifaceted practice choreographs light in space, photograph and sculpture. Working in abstraction while pointedly engaged with questions of equity, Thomsen’s installation practice engages the public in wonder as a radical way to imagine post-patriarchal futures.

Photographs of flowers has dominated the art gallery world ever since the invention of the camera. While most artists are drawn to botanical scenes because of the inherent beauty of each individual flower, Ron van Dongen's approach is one of pure dedication. Born in Judibana, Venezuela in 1961, van Dongen was raised in Warmond, The Netherlands, and studied health science and biology at the Nederlandse Leraren Opleiding in Delft. From 1989 to 1992, he studied photography at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. Soon after, van Dongen began to blend his love for science and art. The result is an ever changing garden in his backyard, consisting of exotic flowers he nurtures from seed, specifically to photograph.

Doug Van Gundy is a poet, essayist and editor whose work orbits around the central ideas of home, place, community, landscape and identity. Doug holds an MFA in Poetry from Goddard College, and directs the Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing at West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon, West Virginia. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in many journals, including The Guardian, Poets & Writers, Poetry, The Oxford American, Appalachian Heritage, and Poetry Salzburg Review. He is co-editor of the anthology Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Contemporary Writing from West Virginia and the author of a book of poems, A Life above Water. He is also the poetry editor of ChangeSeven, an on-line journal of poetry, prose and visual art.

Originally a poet, Rebecca Norris Webb often interweaves her text and photographs in her seven books, most notably with her monograph, My Dakota—an elegy for her brother who died unexpectedly—with a solo exhibition of the work at The Cleveland Museum of Art (2015), among other venues. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Le Monde, National Geographic, and is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Cleveland Museum of Art, and George Eastman Museum, Rochester, N.Y. Rebecca is an NEA grant recipient, and her eighth book, Night Calls—in which she retraces the route of her 100-year-old country doctor father’s house calls through the same rural Indiana county where they both were born—will be published by Radius in fall 2020.

Alex Webb has published seventeen photography books, including The Suffering of Light, a survey book of 30 years of his color photographs. He’s exhibited at museums worldwide including the Whitney Museum of American Art, N.Y., the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A Magnum Photos member since 1979, his work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, and other publications. He has received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. His most recent books are La Calle: Photographs from Mexico and the collaborative book with Rebecca Norris Webb, Brooklyn: The City Within, the latter currently an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York through spring 2021.

Amanda Williams is a visual artist who trained as an architect. Her creative practice employs color as a way to draw attention to the complexities of how race shapes how we assign value to space in cities. The landscapes in which she operates are the visual residue of the invisible policies and forces that have misshapen most major US cities. Williams’ installations, paintings and works on paper seek to inspire new ways of looking at the familiar and in the process, raise questions about the state of urban space and ownership in America. Amanda has exhibited widely, including the MoMA (NY), the Venice Architecture Biennale, the MCA Chicago, and a public commission at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. She recently won the commission to design a permanent monument to Shirley Chisholm in Brooklyn NY. Amanda has been recognized as a Joan Mitchell Foundation grantee, a USA Ford Fellow, an Efroymson Arts Fellow and a Leadership Greater Chicago Fellow. Amanda is also a member of the Obama Presidential Center's Museum Design Team and sits on the boards of the Graham Foundation, Garfield Park Conservatory and Hyde Park Art Center. Her work is in several permanent collections including the Art Institute of Chicago and the MoMA (NY). Williams lives and works on the south side of Chicago.

Jeffrey A. Wolin is Ruth N. Halls Professor Emeritus of Photography at Indiana University. Wolin’s photographs have been exhibited in over 100 exhibitions in the US and Europe, including solo shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, International Center of Photography in New York, George Eastman Museum in Rochester and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and group exhibitions at MoMA, Whitney Museum, and LA County Museum of Art. His photographs are in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Cleveland Museum of Art; Houston Museum of Fine Arts; Art Institute of Chicago; New York Public Library; George Eastman Museum, Rochester; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Bibliotèque Nationale de France, Paris; and Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Born in West Bend, Wisconsin in 1962, Douglas Wurster graduated from UW Madison with a degree in Economics and Russian History and later on, Landscape Architecture. In the mid 90’s he moved to the Pacific Northwest where he concentrated on landscape and interior design. Eventually he specialized in fine(art) carpentry and furniture restoration. He is currently designing and building his new home on Orcas Island, WA.

For sizes and prices, as well as additional information on the artists, view the
"Photography & _____" Catalog.

Please call: (312) 266-2350 for prices of specific pieces.