Light Work Podcast

Nabil Harb’s project Mater si, magistra no (a macaronic phrase that translates as “Mother yes, teacher no”) presents photographs that describe and depict moments and scenes within his hometown of Lakeland in Polk County, Florida. This Central Florida location is both the backdrop and main character of Harb’s visual narrative: a story that emits surreal qualities which twist ideas of the region through photography’s formal language into a conceptual idea—an idea of how to describe the atmosphere of a place without words. Harb writes, “The landscape is the perfect reflection of our society, our ultimate index—it holds our histories, our secrets, our failures, and our hopes for the future.” Harb uses his camera to look rather than gaze at the wily scenes and moving bodies; his images disturb the before and after of a photograph by showing a moment extended or an instant flashed with a strobe. The project title informs Harb’s reasons and choices around his subject matter with his opinions and beliefs about this landscape, the people who inhabit it and move through it, and his subjecthood. The history of land usage in Central Florida greatly influences where he goes to photograph and how he looks at his surroundings. The narratives in his work are conflicting and intermingle with one another. The overriding story is one of man versus nature, of beauty and destruction coexisting in an atmosphere that is surreal, seductive, and breathtaking. Where the conflicting notions of destruction and rebirth intersect is also the point at which Nabil Harb’s formalism and conceptual photographic practice meet, showing us the potential for beauty in destruction and foreboding rebirth. Image credit: Nabil Harb, Lake Hancock, 2024—Nabil Harb is a Palestinian American photographer born and raised in Polk County, Florida, where he still lives. Harb received his BA in anthropology from the University of South Florida and his MFA in photography from Yale University. His work has been featured in Aperture, The Atlantic, ArtReview, The Guardian, and A24. nabiljharb.com/—Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media daylightblue.comLight Work lightwork.org

In this exhibition, Nicholas Muellner offers up photographs depicting people pantomiming in a verdant landscape made complex with surreal lighting; these images are paired with an issue of Contact Sheet that serves as a guidebook to the exhibition. The text in Contact Sheet is wryly poetic and succinct, and loosely leads us from picture to picture. Asea takes us somewhere without making its destination specific, setting a tone and mood that guides our desire for meaning but refuses to precisely locate it.The exhibition conveys a type of suspended drama via an installation that divides the gallery into two rooms, creating an atmosphere in which viewers float, both in space and time. The majority of the portraits are of people connected to the maritime economy and all of the photographs were made in a landscape or setting that the subjects live in: Marseille, Odesa, Milan, Long Beach. The subjects gesture toward the camera, holding the invisible tools of their respective trades, and suggesting an estrangement from their concrete identities.With Asea, Muellner projects a state of limbo and a search for personal meaning within photography’s inevitable narrative limits. We are asked to ponder alone, in a subjective state that is not fixed but which hovers within the parameters established by the photographs and text. Ultimately, we engage with Asea because it is at once thoughtful, beautiful, and curious.—Nicholas Muellner is an artist and writer whose books include Lacuna Park: Essays and Other Adventures in Photography, The Amnesia Pavilions, and In Most Tides an Island, which was shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Award and named a Best Book of the Year in Artforum. In addition to solo exhibitions in the United States and Europe, his writing has been published by MACK/SPBH, Aperture, Radius, Triple Canopy, Foam, and Routledge, among others. Muellner has performed slide lectures internationally, including at MoMA PS1, Carnegie Museum, The Photographers’ Gallery, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. His work has been supported by a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, a John Gutmann Fellowship, and residencies at the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies. Muellner received a BA in comparative literature from Yale University and an MFA from Temple University. He is the founding co-director of the Image Text MFA and ITI Press at Cornell University.nicholasmuellner.com—Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media daylightblue.comLight Work lightwork.org

According to the Laws of Chance: Group ExhibitionMay 31–August 16, 2024Kathleen O. Ellis GalleryReception: Friday, July 26, 5-7pmAccording to the Laws of Chance is a subtitle included in many works by the Dadaist painter Jean Arp that describes his systematic yet chance-driven method of creating his simple and playful paintings. Arp would let torn pieces of paper fall to the floor to determine his painting or collage compositions. Although the outcomes are different, Arp’s ethos can be found in the work of the photographers selected for this group exhibition.The artists in this exhibition—Cheryl Miller, Claire A. Warden, Jaclyn Wright, Josh Thorson, Kyle Tata, Louis Chavez, and Will Stith, and Light Work’s collection artists, Cecil McDonald, Jr., James Welling, Peter Finnemore, and Rita Hammond—are using and defining chance as a core element of their largely divergent practices.Chance is a core tenet of photography. The image-makers in this exhibition embrace the unpredictable and find ways to amplify chance for conceptual and creative purposes. These artists interpret chance via darkroom and analog experimentation, conceptually driven exploration, daily image-making, and studio-based arranging. The results of these methods are surprising expressions of each artist’s voice. Together they showcase the wide-ranging use of chance and highlight it as a vital tool in contemporary photographic practice.Special thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.comLight Worklightwork.orgCover Image by Jaclyn Wright

In 1987, Sophia Chai immigrated to New York City from South Korea as a teenager without knowing English. Looking back, she has described that experience as feeling untethered to any internal compass that she could use to navigate her place in a new country with a new language. She visually explains these experiences to us by reinterpreting the Korean language’s characters in photographs that enable us to see the contradictions of visual and verbal communication.Chai uses optics (focal length, perspective, perception, and magnification) to pin down the marks, rubbings, and paintings on her studio walls. The overall effect is a collage of ideas, with an efficient yet complicated economy of picture making with intentional gaps. These gaps can describe the moment right before the sound of a word comes out of the interior space of the mouth.sophiachai.com—Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media daylightblue.comLight Work lightwork.org

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

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

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

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