2021 Exhibitions
New Sicilian Topographics
Massimo Cristaldi, Sandro Scalia, and Blaise Tobia
@ 3808 Lancaster AVE GallerY
September 16-26 2021
New Sicilian Topographics is a show of three photographers including two Sicilians, Massimo Cristaldi and Sandro Scalia, and one Sicilian-American, Blaise Tobia. They all document Sicily in the "new topographics" style that was first recognized in the seminal 1975 exhibition "New Topographics" at the George Eastman House.
Image by Massimo Cristaldi
Ancient Light
Photographs By Melanie King @ Big Day Film Collective
September 1–October 10, 2021
Big Day Film Collective is pleased to host "Ancient Light," a solo exhibition of an astronomical photographic series taken by artist, Melanie King. These exquisite photographic prints are striking as they possess the unique qualities of being hand printed and developed using plant based developers to create beautiful, ethereal works. Ancient Light was born out of a desire to capture light from distant stars directly onto photosensitive film. Distinct from photographs of terrestrial objects, light travels for thousands, if not millions, of years before reaching the lens. To create the “Ancient Light” series of photographs, Melanie King travelled to dark sky locations away from light pollution. King was often alone outside in the darkness, an experience which they found challenging as a young female. As a result, King was in awe of female astronomers and explorers who take similar risks on a regular basis. The starlit landscapes in this series were created in rural areas of Italy, Iceland, Spain, and Ireland. Within the United Kingdom, Melanie travelled to rural Cambridgeshire, Lands End, and the Lake District. More recently, King has been observing the night sky from their local area of Margate and Ramsgate.
Rolls and Tubes
Christy McDonald, Colleen Mullins, Jenny Sampson, and Nicole White
@ Philadephia Photo Arts Center / Crane Arts Hallway
September 21 - December 30th, 2021
The commodification of the commonplace has become a running theme of the COVID-19 pandemic. Having made homebodies of us all, COVID-19 has created absurd rolling shortages, of flour, hair dye, and of course, toilet paper. This was the genesis of the ongoing work by the Rolls & Tubes Collective. In this work, each of the four artists has reinterpreted a known photograph in the arc of contemporary, and the history of photography, utilizing toilet paper as an element of the image.
Rolls & Tubes Collective is comprised of four professionally accomplished women photographers from California; Christy McDonald, Colleen Mullins, Jenny Sampson, and Nicole White. Each artist comes from a different photographic modality and they initially joined together to form a critique group, but transformed into an art-making collective in the face of the first COVID-19 lockdown.
Image by Christy McDonald
Meadow’s Blistering Berry
Ginevra Shay @ Pentimenti Gallery
Sept. 7 - Oct. 16, 2021
Meet the Artist: Friday, September 10th, 6-8pm
Pentimenti Gallery welcomes the fall with a solo show of photography of Ginevra Shay.
Ginevra Shay’s abstract photography defies easy entry or interpretation as it seeks to dismember the medium’s tendency toward structure and lucidity. The work is layered and luminous, comprised of multiple colorcast overlays, and is hand printed by the artist in color and black and white darkrooms. Motifs of interiors and natural environments are present in the work, but they are obscured and voided of context, placed instead into fields of color glowing dreamscapes. The images glisten with a vivid light that is only accentuated by the darkness it is set against. Process and narrative are entangled in the work, as time and space bend to form an ultra-saturated vision of a reality intrinsic to dreams and film.
Illusions and Other Protective Spells
Emma Safir @ Pentimenti Gallery
Sept. 7 - Oct. 16, 2021
Meet the Artist: Friday, Sept. 10, 6 - 8 pm
Pentimenti Gallery presents a group show Illusions and Other Protective Spells of work by Mimi Jung, Melissa Joseph and Emma Safir.
Emma Safir creates mixed-media works incorporating digital collage, and numerous textiles and techniques. Lush digital prints are interwoven in dazzling, often humorous arrangements, creating a dancing repartee between photographic imagery and abstraction. The works reference utilize their tenuous connection with photography to imply the distance between experience and memory. Vision, place, and objectivity are scrambled into blurred, dreamlike images, and soft, indecipherable forms.
Proxy War
Justyna Badach @ Saint Joseph's University Gallery
August 25 – September 24, 2021
Justyna Badach's "Proxy War" exhibit features 16 large-scale gun powder and casein dichromate prints that comment on propaganda of war. The rather innocuous images come to life after examining their explosive composition and pernicious origination. The ISIS video stills which are the backdrop for the prints work in tandem with the authentic ISIS titles and Russian and American proselytizing language to illustrate the cunning methods used to turn violence into proud moments of male camaraderie. Badach’s work acknowledges the modern technology and social media used to attract followers, glorify military operations and emotionally desensitize viewers to the brutality of war. The exhibition runs August 25 - September 24, 2021.
Monalog Collective
@ Stirner Modern
September 3 - 26th, 2021
The Monalog™ Collective is a group of black and white film photographers who create images using traditional wet printing methods and materials, such as silver gelatin paper in the darkroom or alternative processes and papers they coat themselves. Monalog is a group of like-minded photographers operating at a high skill level that has formed to promote black and white analog photography, the industry that supports it. We foster the growth of our community through membership and engagement with others, individually and through broader collaborative activity.
The Time is yours Portraiture Exhibit
Curated by Photographer Don Bell @ Cherry Street Pier
September 3 - 26, 2021
The Time is Yours is a photographic time capsule that uses portraiture to examine what is, was, and is yet to come. Personal, political, socioeconomic history and more have led each of us to where we are: a protestor kneeling in prayer in front of a raging fire; a woman in front of a church angelically raising her arms towards the heavens. All moments are connected to the past. A collection of photographers spanning the globe from Pennsylvania to India offered an interpretation of this concept while documenting one of our most valuable natural resources: people.
Image by Kit Ramsey
Our Germantown Stories
@ Wyck Historic House, Garden, & Farm
Our Germantown Stories is a digital exhibition made in partnership with the Lenfest Center for Cultural Partnerships at Drexel University and the National Endowment for the Humanities that explores how the unique qualities of Germantown, both then and now, have affected the people who settled here. This virtual exhibit places selected reminiscences from interviews with community members in historical context and alongside Wyck collection objects and photographs. The juxtaposition reveals the closeness of the past and the consistency of Germantown’s spirit. Perhaps most importantly, it shows just how essential Wyck’s current neighbors are to the process of giving meaning to the site.
Yasuomi Hashimura: Future Déjà Vu
@ Unique Photo / Old City
September 9 - November 14, 2021
"Yasuomi Hashimura: Future Déjà Vu," curated by Susanna Gold, marks the artist's U.S. debut. Hashimura’s ongoing "Future Déjà Vu" series features abstracted images of historic sculpture, architecture, and landscape from Paris, Rome, and his native Japan. Hashimura creates each photograph as a single work of art, combining darkroom printing with calligraphic brushwork that recalls traditional Japanese ink painting, or sumi-e. Working with photographic emulsion as his medium, Hashimura layers gestural strokes and drips that both obscure and emphasize portions of the image, removing it from the particulars of time and space. By re-imagining ancient artifacts and traditional culture according to his own contemporary vision, Hashimura modernizes the historic in his "Future Déjà Vu" series, encouraging the viewer to suspend traditional notions of past and present, memory and history, loss and preservation.
2020 In Perspective: Selections from the 2020 Pictures of the Year Archive
@ Swarthmore College List Gallery
September 9 – October 19, 2021
2020 IN PERSPECTIVE, an exhibition installed at two venues at Swarthmore College — the List Gallery and McCabe Library — features more than 190 images taken during the COVID-19 pandemic by 36 photographers representing 19 different nationalities. Selected from the archives of the 2020 Pictures of the Year Competition (POY), the photographs highlight the varied ways people experienced the pandemic and related challenges, such as climate crisis, systemic injustice, and civil rights activism. While the pandemic instilled a sense of isolation in many people, it also demonstrated our global interdependence, the impact of digital images, and the importance of photojournalism. With this exhibition and related events, Swarthmore is pleased to collaborate with the organizers of the Pictures of the Year Competition (POY), a project of the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. Since 1944, the POY competition has been organized annually in order to call attention to the importance of documentary photography, especially during times of crisis. Please check The List Gallery website for possible changes due the pandemic.
Image by Deanne Fitzmaurice titled; ‘Brianna Noble: Urban Cowgirl’
Politics of Place
@ Greenline Workspace
4218 Lancaster Ave Philadelphia, 19104
September 19th- Nov 1st.
Politics of Place explores Svalbonas’s interest in architecture and ideas of home which have been the subject of her work for the last decade. Her cultural background as an ethnically Latvian/Lithuanian artist informs this interest. Svalbonas’s parents spent many years after the end of World War II in displaced persons (DP) camps in Germany before they were allowed to emigrate to the United States. Their childhood memories were of temporary structures, appropriated from other (often military) uses to house tens of thousands of postwar refugees. Her connection to this history has made her acutely aware of the impact of politics on architecture, and in turn on a people’s daily lived experience. Svalbonas’s work explores architecture’s relationship to cultural identity, social hierarchy, and psychological space.
A Quiet Light
@ Wiota Street Garden
A Quiet Light: Photographs by Amie Potsic, Laurence Salzmann, Harris Fogel, Milton Lindsay, John Singletary, and Oscar Tabares Reyes is a photographic exhibition presented by Salzmann’s Photo West Gallery in coordination with Philadelphia’s 20/20 Photography Festival. The show will take place in West Philadelphia’s beautiful Wiota St. Garden, and work will be displayed within the natural beauty of this unique and inviting environment. Each artist will present selected works that address their own personal response to the festival’s overarching theme, history informs the contemporary. Please join us for evenings of food, drink, gathering and art in this bucolic, one of a kind setting.
The exhibition dates are as follows:
Opening Reception: Sunday, September 19th, 2021 from 2:00-6:00pm
Closing Reception - Sunday, September 26th, 2021 from 2:00-6:00pm
The Exhibition will be held at:
Wiota Street Garden (located at the Intersection of Powelton Avenue and Wiota Street) Philadelphia, PA 19104
Ditta Baron Hoeber: Inscapes
@ Tiger Strikes Asteroid
September 25, 2021 — October 30, 2021
Artist-Poet Ditta Baron Hoeber produces works that mediate upon the nature of seeing. Photography, drawing, and painted photographs are arranged in rhythmic sequences that are sometimes mounted in accordion books. Inscapes presents new works by the artist from 2019 to 2021. With a practice spanning six decades, her photographs, drawings, poems, and artist books number in the thousands. The majority of her projects have never been shown.
Inscape: (noun) an inward quality belonging uniquely to objects or events in human experience, as perceived by the poet, embodied in patterns of poetic elements such as imagery, rhythm, rhyme, assonance, sound symbolism, and allusion. (Merriam-Webster)
The title of this exhibition, Inscapes, layers upon this definition a portmanteau of “interior” and “landscape,” the artist’s psyche as a scene. Most of the works in Inscapes are images of Ditta Baron Hoeber’s home, arranged in what she terms “photographic sequences,” framed or presented in hand-made accordion books.
Letters to Jonas
@ Philiput
September 21 - October 2nd
Letters to Jonas- International Homage to Jonas Mekas, is an initiative dedicated to the artist Jonas Mekas, his life, his work, his memory, poetry and sensitivity of his expression. We want to emphasize the magnitude, depth and importance of his work; the way in which it unites us. We celebrate Jonas with gratitude for his eternal contribution to the universe and to art.
Letters to Jonas-, is composed by two bodies of work, the first one is the result of an International mail art open call, wich holds up to 55 works of artists from 33 countries. Polaroid photos, videos, poems, drawings, anecdotes and some crazy artifacts arrived to this growing celebration of the lithuaninan artist.The other part of the exhibition is composed by 13 stablished Mexican artists and a special video collaboration by the brazillian homage VIVA JONAS!
Anastasia Samoylova: FloodZone
@ The Print Center
September 24 – November 13, 2021
FloodZone features large-scale photographic works that examine the omnipresent effects of climate change in Miami, Florida, meditating on the effects of rising water levels as a result of global warming. The series “FloodZone” does not present us with the familiar images of climate catastrophe, but instead reveals its traces in the everyday – from corners of dilapidated buildings and pools of stagnant water to sidewalks with battered trees and skylines of upturned billboards.
Anastasia Samoylova, Gator, 2017, pigment print, 40” x 60”. Courtesy of the Artist and The Print Center
Back and Forth:
The Space in Between
@ The Print Center
September 24 – November 13, 2021
Back and Forth: The Space in Between is a solo exhibition of work by Ivanco Talevski, mapping the artist’s bifurcated existence between his adopted home of Philadelphia and his birthplace in Bitola, Macedonia. The immersive installation of new prints, drawings, projections and sound works investigates notions of memory, history and belonging, as well as the multiplicity of identities a single individual can embody.
Ivanco Talevski, Projection #13, 2021, 2021. Wreckage: June 13, 2021, 2021, charcoal on paper, projected on an empty home in the village of Gyavato, near Bitola, Macedonia. Courtesy of the Artist and The Print Center
Stop Demolishing Philly: An Exhibition and Call to Action /
Photos by Bradley Maule
@Security Elevator Co.
September 10 - October 2nd
STOP DEMOLISHING PHILLY. It’s a pretty straightforward sentiment. As Philadelphia has turned the corner on decades of population loss and actually grown over the past 20 years, it has increasingly come at the expense of the historic fabric that makes it such a desirable place to live.
History is Philadelphia’s brand. Birthplace of America. Workshop of the World. City of Homes. And yet, despite the historic bona fides, 21st century development has brought demolition into every corner of the city, driven by incentivized development in a tireless real estate boom, fueling gentrification, altering the city’s beloved neighborhood streetscapes.
Test Shot: Film Camera Lending Library Project
@ Photo Lounge
We partnered with the Halide Project to help test a collection of cameras that are included in their Camera Lending Library! Together we wanted to take this project farther by involving the community and compiling the photos taken on the test rolls into an engaging show. This project is about taking a simple task of testing cameras and turning it into something that celebrates the photo community in Philadelphia. It is about the timelessness of photography and the power each photo holds, the magic of decades old equipment given a new life in young hands. It is about the love of photography, and the importance of that common bond.