Light Work Podcast

In her first US solo exhibition, Karolina Wojtas is sending us a conceptual care package, as an installation titled Made in Poland. Presented here are images of her family, friends, sometimes herself, kitsch objects, and folkish cultural treasures. These images are printed onto inkjet paper and textiles; soft sculptures, a video, and a text piece in the form of a letter together make up Wojtas’s own little fun fair in the Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery.There is a cultural legend in Poland about a “rich uncle from America” that everyone’s parents or grandparents used to have. This mythological uncle who emigrated from the US would send back care packages with clothes, food, and little treasures from America. This exhibition flips the tale into Wojtas’s own fable and conjures up a rich aunt from Poland who mails Polish cultural treasures to her nephew in America.Wojtas’s work derives from her surroundings and experiences—childhood, education, siblings, first love, and death. Her images originate from amateur pictures found on the internet; all taken in situations that are almost impossible to explain. She is an artist whose work combines photography, installation, and performance to create spaces full of surprise, childlike imagination, and spontaneity. For her, art is an endless game and experiment, where audiences become part of the experience.Made in Poland inhabits an unencumbered visual maze of play that is free of restrictions and traditional conventions—all birthed from Wojtas’s imagination and let loose in Syracuse. This project is truly an export of experimentation and curiosity—like a traveling souvenir shop, but with an underlying absurdity that is both terrifying and terrific.—Karolina Wojtas (b. 1996, Poland) has presented her works in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Poland and abroad, at the Asama International Photo Festival, Japan (2025), Oslo Negative (2024), Foto Arsenal Wien (2023), and Foam Amsterdam (2021), to name only a few. She is a two-time recipient of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage scholarship and has received numerous awards and nominations, including an Images Vevey Book Award 2025–26 Honorable Mention. Her work has appeared in such publications as the British Journal of Photography, Foam Magazine, The Guardian, and King Kong Magazine. Wojtas graduated from the Lodz Film School and the Institute of Creative Photography in the Czech Republic. In 2019 she opened her own museum in her home village of Podkarpacie, Poland.Cover Image: Karolina Wojtas, from the project, Made in Poland, 2026. karolinawojtas.comInstagram: @matriioszkaSpecial thanks to Daylight Blue Mediadaylightblue.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Aaron Turner: The Archive as LiberationMay 12–August 29, 2025Kathleen O. Ellis GalleryReception: Friday, July 25th, 5-7pmThe Archive as Liberation is a publication and exhibition organized by Aaron Turner (Light Work artist–in-residence, 2018, and Light Work exhibiting artist, 2021). Turner has gathered a unique group of artists and writers to engage in dialogue around archival photographic methods. Contributors include Andre Bradley, calista lyon, Raymond Thompson Jr., Harrison D. Walker, and Savannah Wood, alongside writing by Chisato Hughes, Alec Kaus, Andrew Martinez, Aaron Turner, Amelia Wallin, and Wendel A. White, with a foreword by the book’s editor, Donasia Tillery. The publication was designed by Elana Schlenker. Tillery writes, “What if memory is not solely an act of recollection, but of discovery and creation? The Archive as Liberation considers this question from the perspectives of subjects who lack access to traditional modes of documentation—Black and Indigenous cultures creatively preserved despite systemic erasure, landscapes that bore witness to colonial conquests, and the lineages that continue to survive in their wake. These works prompt us to consider not just what we remember but how we remember. In doing so, they work to inspire a more authentic vision of the past and a liberated vision of the future.” To mark the launch of this publication, Light Work has mounted an exhibition highlighting many of the contributing artists. This exhibition includes work by Andre Bradley, Chisato Hughes, Alec Kaus, calista lyon, Raymond Thompson Jr., Harrison D. Walker, Wendel A. White, and Savannah Wood. The exhibition also includes a unique reading room curated by Turner with artists’ books from his personal collection and pieces from Light Work’s collection. The reading room will be in Light Work’s Lab for the duration of the exhibition.Image Credit: Harrison D. Walker, Between Two Worlds, Footnotes, 2025—Aaron Turner is a photographer, educator, and independent curator, born and raised in the Arkansas Delta. Turner holds an MA from Ohio University and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts. In his studio practice, he uses the 4×5 view camera to create still-life studies on identity, history, abstraction, and archives. He has organized the following selected exhibitions and symposiums: And Let It Remain So: Women of the African Diaspora (Phoenix Art Museum, 2022), Time & Empathy: Arkansas Photographer Geleve Grice (University of Arkansas, 2021–22), and Resounding Sovereign Expressions: Resurgent Indigenuity in Ozark Arts Practice & Scholarship (University of Arkansas, 2025). He most recently joined the University of Michigan’s Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design as an assistant professor.—Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media daylightblue.comLight Work lightwork.org Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.