The Sun Echoed Like A Song is an exhibition of photographs made in Eduardo L Rivera’s childhood hometown near the Arizona/Mexico border. Taking inspiration from light and heat, he has been exploring the personal histories of family, community, and environment throughout the last decade.eduardolrivera.com—Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media daylightblue.comLight Work lightwork.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Shunyo Raja (Kings of a Bereft Land), Arko Datto’s epic three-part series chronicles the lives of those living in the world’s largest delta, variously known as the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna Delta. Climate change has rapidly put this immense region and its inhabitants in danger. Even as the artist summarizes the complexity and scale of the challenges confronting both, he knows his time with this landscape is fleeting.arkodatto.com—Special thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jenny Calivas' images breathe in photography’s liminal space between intuition and what words can only sometimes convey. Here is a photographer whose practice is consistently curious and rigorous. Her images can unexpectedly taunt us, at once generous and withholding, still and active. In so doing, Calivas wrestles and succeeds with a multitude of ideas—from the spiritual to the feminist to the ecological—and elicits moods that range from the humorous to the existential.jennifercalivas.com—Intro/Outro Music: Vela Vela by Blue Dot SessionsSpecial thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Guanyu Xu’s Suspended Status depicts an artist caught in a web of red tape. The work on view for this exhibition comprises images from his ongoing series, Resident Aliens, as well as a large grid of images that he calls Suspension. Both bodies of work use visa status in the United States as a means of framing images that depict people who are suspended between countries and cultures. Their futures hang on faceless state agencies in a churning political current. Xu's major influences are the production of ideology in American visual culture and a conservative familial upbringing in China. Xu’s practice examines the production of power in photography as well as the fate of personal freedom and its relationship to political regimes. He negotiates these questions from his perspective as a Chinese gay man. He makes use of photography, new media, and installation, and his work across media intentionally reflects aspects of his displaced and fractured identity.xuguanyu.com—Music: "Agree to Disagree" by Zero VIntro/Outro Music: Vela Vela by Blue Dot SessionsSpecial thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Samantha Box’s new body of work, Caribbean Dreams, is a series of complex studio still lifes of personal, familial, and regionally-referenced objects, heirlooms, fruits, vegetables, and plants, onto which she collages family and vernacular images, fruit stickers, packaging, and receipts. A departure from earlier methods and subject matter, the constructed, experimental, and unpredictable compositions of Caribbean Dreams embody Box’s exploration of multiple diasporic Caribbean histories and identities.Box’s new methods pose an opportunity and dilemma: once you seize the freedom to create an image from scratch, where do you begin? With a new camera, family artifacts, and grocery store produce, she embarked on making tabletop still lifes. She cites seeing a forgotten fruit from her childhood, the soursop, in her local green market as what started her down the path of creating images in the studio. Present in all of Box’s constructions is her desire to see her Caribbean identity and history from as many angles as possible. Each new generation of images both invites and prods the viewer to consider the recurring objects with a fresh perspective.samanthabox.com—Music: "Skip Song" by A. A. AaltoIntro/Outro Music: Vela Vela by Blue Dot SessionsSpecial thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Light Work presents "The Lottery" a solo exhibition of new works by Pittsburgh-based photographer Melissa Catanese. In "The Lottery," Catanese turns her attention to the tense and confusing state of contemporary politics and culture. Her images bring together large groups of people, barren caverns, natural forces, physical exertion, and eruptions both crude and colorful. The accumulated manic puzzle shifts the viewer from crowded street to darkened cavern. Along the way, we see a geyser of oil, streaks of lightning, veins of molten rock, and cooling craters. Punctuating these natural phenomena are people in states of glee, pain, confusion, and anguish.Catanese borrows the title from literature. In Shirley Jackson’s famous short story, a village casually embarks on a yearly ritual of selecting an individual and then stoning them to death. Catanese’s "The Lottery" teases out similar themes regarding ritual, culture, and the diffused accountability of a mob.Melissa Catanese’s work blends anonymous photographs, press clips, and images from NASA’s archive with her own. Single images resemble sentence fragments that Catanese completes with her sequences. Sometimes seamlessly blending in, Catanese’s own images also act as punctuation throughout the work. This creates a sensation of call and response between the archival material and Catanese’s own images that brings to mind the Chauvet Cave in southeastern France. There, brilliant cave paintings date back 37,000 years. Over this enormous stretch of time, additional visitors added their own marks to the cave murals, sometimes with gaps of more than 5,000 years. The idea that collaboration can reach across time, decoding or willfully rethinking, is present throughout "The Lottery."melissacatanese.com—Music: "Pacing" by Blue Dot SessionsIntro/Outro Music: Vela Vela by Blue Dot SessionsSpecial thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Futari (Two Persons) is an exhibition of photographs depicting the ongoing relationship between the artist Pixy Liao and her Japanese partner and muse Moro. Liao met Moro at the University of Memphis in 2005 while attending graduate school, where she invited Moro, who is five years younger, to model for her. In some ways, this served to reverse expectations that women seek older and wiser men. From the beginning of their collaboration, Liao took the role of the director, arranging and posing Moro, so that together they challenge traditional heterosexual roles. For fourteen years now, Liao and Moro have continued to explore ideas of control, dominance, gender, and sexuality through photography.—Born and raised in Shanghai, China, Pixy Liao now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Liao has participated in exhibitions and performances internationally, including Asia Society (Houston), Fotografiska (New York City), Museum of Sex (New York City), National Gallery of Australia (Sydney), and Rencontres d’Arles (Arles, France). She has received honors that include En Foco’s New Works Fellowship, Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival Madame Figaro Women Photographers Award, LensCulture’s Exposure Award, NYFA Fellowship in photography, and Santo Foundation’s Individual Artist Award. Liao was a Light Work Artist-in-Residence in 2015. Her other residencies include Camera Club of New York, Center for Photography at Woodstock, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Pioneer Work, School of Visual Arts, and University of Arts London. She holds an MFA in photography from the University of Memphis. Chambers Fine Art in New York City represents her.pixyliao.com—Intro/Outro Music: Vela Vela by Blue Dot SessionsSpecial thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.orgMusic: "Oh My," "Little Curry Man," and "Mimoku" by PIMO Band pimoband.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In his new exhibition, Object Lessons, artist James Henkel looks back over thirty years of image-making, following a conceptual and formal thread that ties his work together and seems to stubbornly insist on resurfacing.Whatever is discarded, broken, and damaged draws Henkel to it. The objects he collects, assembles, or deconstructs are humble, common, and often no more than the scale of the human hand. Both the patina of wear and the handling that was often the source of the object’s destruction are clearly present. He presents pieces of ceramic pots, bowls, bricks, toys, combs, and well-worn books in their broken fragments. Completely useless now, they remain a testimony to someone’s life. This is what Henkel elevates by photographing these found objects so directly. Tension abounds in his work between the humble and the monumental, between play and decay, between high and low. The artist cross-references grander ideas from art history, painting, and sculpture, while also pointing back to the simpler but profound experience of photographing an ordinary life.Jameshenkelstudio.com—Intro/Outro Music: Vela Vela by Blue Dot SessionsSpecial thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Clifford Prince King is a self-taught queer Black photographer from Arizona. The images in this exhibition focus on King’s life in Los Angeles. In his work, King’s lifestyle and experiences are starting points to explore desire, intimacy, and day-to-day life with HIV. King’s images chronicle himself and others located in lamp-lit domestic settings. We see a brotherhood of men enacting moments of domestic bliss, nude bodies in the moments before or after a sexual encounter, and the side effects and routine of living with HIV. After King’s diagnosis, he focused anew on understanding the legacy of the AIDS crisis and the artists who responded to it. He took refuge in the words and images of those who once shared an experience like his own, and his work evokes that history while developing a language all his own. In talking about his practice, King returns time and again to the life-affirming aspects of his relationships. In We Used to Lay Together, King has compiled a body of work that explores affection in all its varieties―the simple parts of intimacy, often overlooked but universal.cliffordprinceking.com—Intro/Outro Music: Vela Vela by Blue Dot SessionsSpecial thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.orgMusic: "Backed Vibes Clean" by Kevin MacLeod Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Meryl Meisler: The Best of Times, Worst of TimesMarch 22 - July 23, 2021Kathleen O. Ellis GalleryIn Light Work’s early days, during the 1970s and 80s, many artists arrived for their month-long residency with no specific plans for using their time. With only a camera and a vague idea of exploring, they walked the streets of Syracuse, open to the synchronicity of what might happen. Incredible photographs ensued and the artists often called them gifts. Grateful to land in the right place at the right time, they discovered images on their contact sheets that startled and delighted them. But they also saw photography as more than random luck. It was both a collaboration and a conversation. They saw themselves as witnesses.Over the same decades, Meryl Meisler was photographing her life in and around New York City with the same sense of exploration and possibility as those pioneering Light Work AIRs. Retiring from decades as a public-school art teacher, Meisler began to unearth and rethink her own archive. Part time capsule of the 70s and 80s and part memoir, Best of Time, Worst of Times is an invitation to join her for a wild ride—disco nights, punk bars, strip clubs, Fire Island, family, friends and neighbors, and suburban Long Island. Her exuberant celebration of human connection is particularly poignant now, when we can take none of these gatherings for granted. Meisler clearly celebrates with her subjects. These are her people: she is not an outsider but a participant. She depicts our own shared humanity, humor, and joy.“I want to show you who I am,” she says now. “My identity as a woman, Jew, lesbian, middle- class teacher, Baby Boomer, New Yorker, liberal, American—and so much more—influences how I perceive and create art about the world around me. I’ve only just begun revealing my huge photography archive. Stay tuned, the best is yet to come!merylmeisler.com—Intro/Outro Music: Vela Vela by Blue Dot SessionsSpecial thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Aaron Turner: Black Alchemy, Backwards/ForwardsJanuary 25 – March 4, 2021Kathleen O. Ellis GalleryLight Work will exhibit more than 20 works by Arkansas–based photographer Aaron Turner in its first main gallery show of 2021. Aaron Turner: Black Alchemy, Backwards/Forwards will be on view in the Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery. In the solitude of the studio, the artist is never alone. Quite the contrary for Aaron Turner. Sidney Poitier, Martin Luther King, Marvin Gay, Frederick Douglas and others all move up and through the layers of cut paper and projections. The artist handles, arranges, touches both objects and beloved figures, seeking, listening, directing, and responding. Some of these juxtapositions seem random, fluid, almost falling through space, but this is precisely the process Turner invites us to witness.Aaron Turner’s Arkansas delta community and family taught him to know and understand African American history, honor its heroes, and respect his elders. The simple and profound gift of this upbringing has allowed him to pursue the role of Black artist and activist in our culture with unapologetic, single-minded intensity. Turner is in many ways acknowledging, standing on, and building from this foundation in his work. With deep affinity for the formal qualities of black-and-white photography, Aaron Turner uses his large format camera and the alchemical darkroom process to move back and forth between abstraction, still life, collage, and appropriated archival images to literally take apart and then reconstruct his photographic images. The color black itself has a presence in this work—infinite, elegant, unknowable. Turner is also a painter; his use of large swaths of black is both a metaphor for race and related to abstraction and its emphasis on process, materials, and color itself as subject.—Besides his studio practice, Aaron Turner is a teacher, curator, writer, founder of the Center for Photographers of Color (CPoC) at the University of Arkansas, and host of the CPoC podcast. Active in the photo and contemporary art community, he often uses these platforms to discuss his primary muses: other Black artists and activists. Bring a pen and notebook, because Turner is a name dropper in the best sense and you will want to look up these painters, sculptors, photographers, athletes, and activists whom he reveres, some hallowed and some obscure (for now). His generosity reminds us of artists like Deborah Willis, Carrie Mae Weems, and Zanele Muholi, who all—understanding art and power—have made it their business to bring a community of artists along with them through the doorway and into the spotlight. He too arrives en masse: perhaps his greatest tribute to his elders in the Arkansas delta.aaronturner.studio—Intro/Outro Music: Vela Vela by Blue Dot SessionsSpecial thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

With great pleasure, Light Work presents Heroine, a solo exhibition of work by Mexican-British multimedia artist and visual anthropologist Alinka Echeverría. Heroine is the culmination of the artist’s extensive research into the representation of women and femininity since the origins of the medium of photography. “With few exceptions, the place of women was before the lens, not behind it,” she acknowledges. As Echeverría immersed herself in the colonial archives of the Nicéphore Nièpce Museum in France, work she embarked on in 2015, the aesthetics of the fetishized and exoticized depiction of women both intrigued and appalled her. Directly referencing the “inventor of photography,” Nicéphore Niépce, Echeverría titles this work more broadly as Fieldnotes for Nicéphora (incorporating the “a” at the end to feminize the name that he had adopted for its meaning: victorious)—thereby explicitly reframing the legacy of this white, male pioneer of photography to a feminist and postcolonial perspective.We are mindful of installing the exhibition amidst an ongoing global pandemic, as we all work to reimagine how physical gallery spaces exist (or don’t) and perhaps expand how works on walls may take on new forms. With that in mind, Echeverría has opened up the ways in which she would normally exhibit photographic work in a gallery. She revisits past collage work innovatively, re-adapting stills from a video piece as large-scale photographic prints and pages from a photobook project, brought to life here as a continuous stream of images wrapping around three of the gallery walls.Echeverría reframes the photographs to examine how she can alter their purpose both through their context and materiality. “As a link between the past and the present, the photographic archive makes time resurface by way of stored visual forms,” Echeverría explains. “In my view, an active reframing allows them to acquire a certain contemporaneity with the new interpretations brought by our contemporary gazes as practitioners and viewers.” Echeverría’s works in Heroine are both visually arresting and profoundly thoughtful—urging viewers to investigate the complexities of the photographic object itself as well as the ways in which its creation, reproduction, and distribution has been problematic since the early 1800s.—Music: "Adrift" and "Resonance" by AirtoneIntro/Outro Music: Vela Vela by Blue Dot SessionsSpecial thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Light Work presents Queens-based artist Matthew Connors’ General Assembly. This exhibition comprises 650 portraits that span the first year of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) in New York City. An expansive project that pairs individual black and white portraits within a tightly formatted grid, General Assembly borrows its title from the movement’s term for its horizontal decision-making process. Connors made these black-and-white portraits in the charged atmosphere of Zuccotti Park, elsewhere in New York City at direct actions and during more contemplative moments before and after working group meetings.We encourage you to visit Light Work exhibitions online and to check out our catalog of artist videos, including an interview with exhibiting artist Matthew Connors.When Connors first arrived at Zuccotti Park in September of 2011, he had no intention of making photographs. He first gravitated to the congregation of protesters who occupied Manhattan’s Financial District out of simple curiosity. But as he observed Occupy Wall Street’s “wellspring of generative social organization,” he wondered how photography could contribute to the historical moment before him. Disturbed by the way that passersby were photographing protesters at a distance, he immersed himself in the activity of the movement and sought to use his camera as a tool of engagement.The process of creating the portraits involved lengthy conversations with the participants about their motivations and involvement in the movement. Building on these newly formed relationships, he regularly returned to demonstrations to photograph and offer each person he photographed a print of their portrait. For Connors, this ongoing exchange of images and ideas contributed to the “relational fabric” that Occupy was cultivating. In many of these portraits, the person gazes directly into the camera at the artist—and us—a rare and brave moment of trust and connection. A native New Yorker, Connors had begun to feel that his home was becoming a “city of strangers” pulled apart by gentrification’s economic power and frequent disruption. By distributing political power and reaching decisions more equitably, Occupy Wall Street sought to reestablish that community.—Matthew Connors received a BA in English Literature from the University of Chicago and an MFA in Photography from Yale University. He has exhibited his work in galleries and museums worldwide, including DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. His awards include the Alice Kimball English Travelling Fellowship from the Yale School of Art (2004), the MacDowell Colony Fellowship (2010), the Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship (2011), and the William Hicks Faculty Fellowship from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design (2012 and 2008). Since 2004 he has taught at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design in Boston, where he chairs the Photography Department. He lives and works in Boston, MA, and Brooklyn, NY.matthewconnors.com—Intro/Outro Music: Vela Vela by Blue Dot SessionsSpecial thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Pacifico Silano’s The Eyelid Has Its Storms… borrows its title from a Frank O’Hara poem. O’Hara’s musings and observations about everyday queer life inspired Silano’s artistic practice. “The eyelid has its storms,” the poem begins. “There is the opaque fish-scale green of it after swimming in the sea and then suddenly wrenching violence, strangled lashed, and a barbed wire of sand falls onto the shore.” O’Hara’s deeply visual poem, like Silano’s work, evokes duality—in memory, in the present, and future, shimmering beauty and umbral violence often occur at once.Through the appropriation of photographs from vintage gay pornography magazines, Silano creates colorful collages that explore print culture and the histories of the LGBTQ+ community. His large-scale works evoke strength and sexuality while acknowledging the underlying repression and trauma that marginalized individuals experience. Born at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Silano lost his uncle due to complications from HIV. “After he died,” says Silano, “his memory was erased by my family due to the shame of his sexuality and the stigma of HIV/AIDS around that time period.” Silano set out to create art that reconciled that loss and erasure. Silano’s exhibition somberly contemplates such pain and photography’s role in the struggle for queer visibility, while celebrating enduring love, compassion, and community.In collaging, Silano decisively fragments, obscures, and layers images that he has rephotographed from these magazines. He reassembles and ultimately recontextualizes these images, removing the overtly explicit original content. “These new pictures-within-pictures are silent witnesses that allude to absence and presence,” says Silano. He sees them as stand-in memorials, both for the now-missing models as well as those who originally consumed their images. Silano meditates on the meaning of the images and tearsheets that he collects over time. What continually excites him is precisely the “slipperiness” of representation and meaning in photography as our culture shifts. “The lens that we read [images] through today gives them new context and meaning,” he observes. “In another 30 or 40 years, they might very well mean something completely different.”—Pacifico Silano is a lens-based artist born in Brooklyn. He has an MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts. His group shows include the Bronx Museum, Museo Universitario del Chopo in Mexico City, Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, and Tacoma Art Museum. His solo shows include Baxter ST@CCNY, The Bronx Museum, Fragment Gallery in Moscow, Rubber-Factory, and Stellar Projects. Aperture, Artforum, and The New Yorker have reviewed his work. Silano’s awards include the Aaron Siskind Foundation’s Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, Finalist for the Aperture Foundation Portfolio Prize, and First Prize at Amsterdam’s Pride Photo Awards. His work is in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection. Silano participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program in 2016.pacificosilano.com—Music: "Dawn Line Approaching" by Blue Dot SessionsMusic: "Vela Vela" by Blue Dot Sessionssessions.blueSpecial thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

November 4 – December 12, 2019Kathleen O. Ellis GalleryGallery Talk: Thursday, November 14, 6pmReception: Thursday, November 14, 5-7pmWendy Red Star makes art that arises from her Native American cultural heritage and family history, as well as her expansive interest in photography, video, sound, sculpture, fiber arts, and performance. Red Star’s artistic practice involves ongoing research into historical archives and narratives, which she thoughtfully deconstructs to explore the intersections of Native American ideologies and colonialism’s unsettling effects on past and present.Red Star grew up on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana. Her exhibition title, Baaeétitchish (One Who Is Talented), references the Crow name she received while visiting home this past summer. It was the original name of her grand-uncle, Clive Francis Dust, Sr., known in the family for his creativity as a cultural keeper. Clearly, Red Star carries that same spirit as an artist. “By carving out space in the contemporary art world,” says Red Star, “I hope it will make it easier for the next generation of Native women artists to gain access to institutions and opportunities.” Red Star’s powerful exhibition at Light Work brings together four photography-based projects produced between 2006 and 2016.Through her work, Red Star says she seeks to complete the missing pieces of the puzzle of her people’s history—a history that colonialism has unfortunately interrupted. “The stories have been scattered,” she says. Important for her Crow community, this re-gathering also helps to tell a more accurate story of America.lg.ht/WendyRedStar—Wendy Red Star holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from University of California, Los Angeles. She has exhibited in the United States and abroad at sites that include Domaine de Kerguéhennec, Fondation Cartier pour l’ Art Contemporain, Hood Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Portland Art Museum, and St. Louis Art Museum. She has been a visiting lecturer at the Banff Centre, CalArts, Dartmouth College, Figge Art Museum, Flagler College, the I.D.E.A. Space in Colorado Springs, National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and Yale University. In 2017, Red Star received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and in 2018 she received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Red Star lives and works in Portland, OR.—Special thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.orgMusic: "Crem Valle" by Blue Dot SessionsMusic: "Vela Vela" by Blue Dot Sessionssessions.blue Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

August 26 – October 17, 2019Kathleen O. Ellis GalleryArtist Talk & Panel: Friday, October 11, 6pmReception: Friday, October 11, 5-7pmSince 2010, the Italian photographer Nicola Lo Calzo has traversed Atlantic coastal areas to research buried memories of the African Diaspora. His latest project, Bundles of Wood documents the rich local history of the Underground Railroad in Central New York.Lo Calzo was born in Torino, Italy, in 1979 and now lives and works in Paris, West Africa, and the Caribbean. For seven years he has engaged in a photographic project about the memories of the slave trade. This ambitious, still ongoing project includes documentation of the descendants of the African diaspora in America, Cuba, Haiti, Suriname, the Caribbean, and West Africa. In his artist’s statement, Lo Calzo asks,“How is it possible that the world organized the social, political, and moral consensus around the slave trade for four centuries, and how is it possible to erase this tragedy from the collective memory of Western countries and even from textbooks? Have the memories of slavery, discarded by history, survived to this day and, if so, in what forms and in what places? How do these memories, repressed by some and preserved by others, define our everyday relationships, our perception, and the place of everyone in society?”In September 2017, Lo Calzo participated in a month-long residency at Light Work, during which he researched and documented Central New York’s own rich history of the Underground Railroad. Bundles of Wood is the resulting photo essay, tracing a clandestine network active up to the American Civil War. In Lo Calzo’s photographs, echoes of slavery linger and reverberate across the centuries. Slaves and “conductors” on the Underground Railroad used the phrase “bundles of wood” as a secret code to communicate “incoming fugitives were expected.”—Nicola Lo Calzo has exhibited his photographs widely in museums, art centers, and festivals, most notably the Afriques Capitales in Lille, the Macaal in Marakesh, the Musee des Confluences in Lyon, the National Alinari Museum of Photography in Florence, and Tropen Museum in Amsterdam. Many public and private collections hold his work, such as the Alinari Archives in Florence, the National Library of France in Paris, and Pinacoteca Civica in Monza Tropen Museum in Amsterdam. Kehrer has published three of Lo Calzo’s books: Regla (2017), Obia (2015), and Inside Niger (2012). He is also a contributor to the international press, including Internazionale, Le Monde, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal. In 2018 Lo Calzo received the Cnap Grant and a nomination for the Prix Elysee 2019-2020.Nicola Lo Calzo: Bundles of Wood is funded in part by the Syracuse Symposium, an annual public events series, exploring the humanities through lectures, workshops, performances, exhibits, films, readings, and more. The year’s programming engages the meaning and impact of “Silence” from diverse perspectives and genres across a range of locations, locally and globally.—Special thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.orgMusic: "Order of Entrance" by Blue Dot SessionsMusic: "Vela Vela" by Blue Dot Sessionssessions.blue Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

March 18 – July 27, 2019Kathleen O. Ellis GalleryGallery Talk: Friday, March 22, 6pmReception: Friday, March 22, 5-7pmLight Work is pleased to present Robert Benjamin’s River Walking, a solo exhibition of photographs and poems spanning four decades. A self-taught photographer and poet, Benjamin’s work, often centered around his family, offers a simple and honest consideration of what it means to live and to love with intention. “I think you have to love your life, and you have to have the courage to find the world beautiful,” says Benjamin. Enchanted by color and the beauty of photography itself, Benjamin uncovers poetry in the everyday.Benjamin never wanted a career in photography. He simply felt that he needed to make pictures. According to Benjamin, one of the great joys of being a photographer is working with cameras. He appreciates the elegance of mechanical objects deeply—their feel, their smell, their sound. Cameras are “exquisite little machines”—like typewriters, he says. Benjamin has been writing poems on his Smith-Corona Clipper longer than he’s made photographs. His poems echo the sensitivity and humble directness of his photographs. More recently, Benjamin has begun pairing what he aptly calls “small photographs” with “small poems,” a selection of which are included in this exhibition.It’s often a mystery why a picture captivates us. A long-time friend, the widely-admired photographer Robert Adams, has written about Benjamin’s portrait of his son, Walker, in his recent book, Art Can Help. The photograph possesses everything that embodies Benjamin’s work—a convergence of time, poetry, color, love, and mystery. Adams writes, “In the distance, the rain is coming our way and the light is about to change. There is, just now, no place on earth exactly like this one.”lg.ht/RiverWalking—Robert Benjamin grew up in Northern Illinois around suburbs, cornfields, lakes, and the remaining prairies. After a brief encounter with college, he traveled—criss-crossing America, eventually to Paris, finally settling in New York City. There, he decided that photography was what he wanted to do. With the absence of any academic training or community he followed his own direction—creating a style and interest that continues to this day. His photos and poems grew intuitively, and draw on the experience of everyday life, far removed from the art world. In 2010, he agreed to a show of his work at the Denver Art Museum. In 2011, the museum and Radius Books published the book of this work, Notes from a Quiet Life. Benjamin continues to write and photograph. He and his family live in Colorado.—Special thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.orgMusic: "That feeling you give me." by bbatvMusic: "Vela Vela" by Blue Dot Sessionssessions.blue Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

January 14 – March 1, 2019Kathleen O. Ellis GalleryGallery Talk: Thursday, January 31, 6pmReception: Thursday, January 31, 5-7pmLight Work is pleased to present American Type, a solo exhibition by artist Rodrigo Valenzuela.lg.ht/AmericanType—Rodrigo Valenzuela completed an art history degree at the University of Chile in 2004 and then worked in construction while making art over his first decade in the United States, receiving an MFA at the University of Washington in 2012. Using staged scenes and digital interventions, Valenzuela’s photography, video, and installation work are rooted in the contradictory traditions of documentary and fiction, often involving narratives on immigration and the working class. Valenzuela participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence Program in August 2017.rodrigovalenzuela.com—Special thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.orgMusic: "Upsurge" by Jonah DempsyMusic: "Vela Vela" by Blue Dot Sessionssessions.blue Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

November 1 – December 13, 2018Kathleen O. Ellis GalleryGallery Talk: Thursday, November 1, 6pmReception: Thursday, November 1, 5-7pmKeisha Scarville’s primary theme is the relationship between transformation and the unknown. Grounded in photography, she works across media to explore place, absence, and subjectivity. After the death of her mother in 2015, Scarville deepened her use of photography as a way to explore how the loss of such an anchor point can affect one’s identity and sense of both absence and self in the world. Scarville’s new exhibition, titled Alma, presents a selection of photographs whose larger subject is transformation born of loss.She has worked on this project for more than three years and has approached it in several different ways that she describes as “chapters.” Initially the work was about body as medium and then, place-as-container, particularly Guyana, South America, Alma’s birthplace, and Crown Heights, Brooklyn, an enclave of Caribbean immigrants where Scarville grew up, which she continues to call home. Working with Alma’s richly patterned clothing and possessions, Scarville says she looks for ways to visually conjure her mother’s presence. “I am interested in how the absent body lives in the photograph and the materiality of absence. I am seeking invocation, something celebratory that rethinks absence as a threshold.”lg.ht/ScarvilleAlma—Keisha Scarville has exhibited at Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, BRIC Arts Media House, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Lesley Heller Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Diasporan Arts, Rush Arts Gallery, and Studio Museum of Harlem. She has participated in artist residencies at Baxter Street CCNY, BRIC Workspace, Center for Photography at Woodstock, Light Work Artist-in-Residence Program, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Vermont Studio Center.keishascarville.com—Special thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.orgMusic: "Time Passing" by David Hilowitz and "Difference" by Kai EngelMusic: "Vela Vela" by Blue Dot Sessionssessions.blue Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

August 27 – October 18, 2018Kathleen O. Ellis GalleryGallery Talk: Thursday, September 20, 6pmReception: Thursday, September 20, 5-7pmLight Work is pleased to announce Be Strong and Do Not Betray Your Soul: Selections from the Light Work Collection. The exhibition is guest-curated by For Freedoms, a platform for civic engagement, discourse, and direct action for artists in the United States, co-founded in 2016 by former Light Work artists-in-residence Eric Gottesman and Hank Willis Thomas. Since then, For Freedoms has produced exhibitions, town hall meetings, and public art to spur greater participation in civic life. On their motivations for starting For Freedoms, Gottesman states, “Our hope was to spark dialogue about our collective civic responsibility to push for freedom and justice today, as those before us pushed for freedom and justice in their time through peaceful protest and political participation.”Borrowing its title from the Charles Biasiny-Rivera piece of the same name, Be Strong and Do Not Betray Your Soul features more than forty photographs from the Light Work Collection that explore topics of politics, social justice, identity, and visibility. These subjects have remained significant for Light Work and many of the artists we have supported over our forty-five year history. The list of artists includes: Laura Aguilar, George Awde, Karl Baden, Lois Barden and Harry Littell, Claire Beckett, Charles Biasing-Rivera, Samantha Box, Deborah Bright, Chan Chao, Renee Cox, Rose Marie Cromwell, Jen Davis, Jess Dugan, John Edmonds, Amy Elkins, Nereyda Garcia Ferraz, Jennifer Garza-Cuen, Antony Gleaton, Jim Goldberg, David Graham, Mahtab Hussain, Osamu James Nakagawa, Tommy Kha, Pipo Nguyen-Duy, Deana Lawson, Mary Mattingly, Jackie Nickerson, Shelley Niro, Suzanne Opton, Kristine Potter, Ernesto Pujol, Irina Rozovsky, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Kanako Sasaki, Pacifico Silano, Clarissa Sligh, Beuford Smith, Amy Stein, Mila Teshaieva, Brian Ulrich, Ted Wathen, Carrie Mae Weems, Carla Williams, Hank Willis Thomas, Pixy Yijun Liao.In addition to the selections of work on view at Light Work, we have collaborated with For Freedoms to display a series of billboards throughout the city of Syracuse created by internationally-renowned artists Zoe Buckman, Eric Gottesman, Carrie Mae Weems, Spider Martin, and Hank Willis Thomas. These billboards use photography and text to address social issues and our political climate. This exhibition and related programming coincides with The 50 State Initiative, an ambitious new phase of For Freedoms Fall 2018 programming, during the lead-up to the midterm elections. Building off of the existing artistic infrastructure in the United States, For Freedoms has developed a network of artists and institutional partners, including Light Work, who will produce nationwide public art installations, exhibitions, and local community dialogues in order to inject nuanced, artistic thinking into public discourse. Centered around the vital work of artists, these exhibitions, and related projects will model how arts institutions can become civic forums for action.lg.ht/BeStrong—Special thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.orgMusic: "Bald Eagle" and "American Crow" by Chad CrouchMusic: "Vela Vela" by Blue Dot Sessionssessions.blue Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.