FotoFilmic18
Exhibition Dates: October 10 - December 20, 2019
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 10, 2019, 6 - 8 PM
FOTOFILMIC18 is the 6th edition of FotoFilmic’s traveling exhibition competition presenting 30 emerging and mid-career photographers from 12 nations in representation of material practices in contemporary photography. Unique in its genre and scope, the exhibition assembles a wide range of analogue and film-based photographic methods collectively picturing a resurgent attraction to, and preoccupation with the materiality of photographic envisioning in a world increasingly defined by computational measures.
SELECTED ARTISTS
Nicola Baldazzi
Florian Bong-Kil Grosse
Marisa Chafetz
Peter Croteau
Clara deTezanos
Shelbie Dimond
Santiago Forero
Marcello Galvani
Clay Jordan
Jordanna Kalman
Jesse Koechling
Demetris Koilalous
Inzajeano Latif
Vinna Laudico
Giannis Manolis
SF Camerawork Executive Director Heather Snider was one of six jurors who selected the following artists. Exhibition jurors included Joachim Brohm (Essen, Germany) and Greg Girard (Vancouver, Canada) as well as renowned international curators of contemporary photography and art Joachim Naudts (Curator, FOMU, Antwerpen, Belgium), Barrie Mowatt (President, Vancouver Biennale, Vancouver, Canada), and Jeong Eun Kim (IANN & The Reference, Seoul, South Korea).
ARTIST BIOS
Nicola Baldazzi (Ravenna, Italy) studied photography with Guido Guidi at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna. Baldazzi is interested in taking pictures of everyday objects, scenes, ordinary events, and watching how the camera transforms the most mundane things, so that they become subtly evocative, ironic, mysterious, and meaningful. Baldazzi won the Giovane Fotografia Italiana (2014), the RAM biennial prize (2015), and the Agarttha arte prize (2018).
Florian Bong-Kil Grosse (Berlin, Germany) is german photographer with a Korean background. Raised in Germany, Floria first returned to Korea, his birth-county, in 2011. His projects reflect his experience in Korea. His observations of everyday life deal with the perceptions of inner versus outer reality, identity formation as well as urban space, nature, the body and the gesture.
Marisa Chafetz (New York, NY, USA) is an artist who works primarily in photography. Her work explores the blurred lines between fictional tableaus and traditional documentary photography. She often deals with topics such as family life, American suburbia, and coming of age. In 2017 she received a grant from the Michael P. Smith fund for Documentary Photography, as well as a Georges Lurcy Grant.
Peter Croteau (Philadelphia, PA, USA) was born in Boston, MA in 1988. As a youth, Peter moved many times through various tract house suburbs as a youth which cued him into the differences and similarities in the landscape across the USA. He became most interested in the concepts of the in-between and the sublime in the landscape and how the two may intersect. He considers himself to be an explorer of mundane spaces looking to transform the everyday into something otherworldly through the use of 8×10 and 4×5 view cameras.
Clara de Tezanos (Gutatemla City, Guatemala), is the Co-Founder and Director of La Fototeca as well as the GuatePhoto Festival. She has played an important role in the promotion of contemporary photography in Guatemala and Latin America. Her artistic participations include various local and international exhibits alongside several curatorial projects.
Shelbie Dimond (Los Angeles, CA, USA) seeks to evoke a potent nostalgia through the use of analog techniques and character-driven scenarios. Focusing on the power of self-portraiture and the female form, her photos reveal a deep sincerity and connection with the process of photography itself.
Santiago Forero (Bogotá, Colombia) is a visual artist and professor of photography. His work engages ideas about the body, identity and scale in relation to familiar media images. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá.
Marcello Galvani (Ravenna, Italy) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ravenna. In 2007 he was awarded the Atlante Italiano 2007 at the Museum Maxxi in Rome, and in 2015 won the prize ‘Sono stato li’ at IUAV, Venice. Galvani’s work focuses on investigating everyday life.
Clay Jordan (Athens, GA, USA) is a musician and photographer who currently lives in Athens, Georgia. His first photographic monograph, Nothing is Coming Soon, which explores themes of aging, mortality, nostalgia, and regret, will be published later this year by Fall Line Press.
Jordanna Kalman (Poughkeepsie, NY, USA) lives and works in NY. Her work explores loneliness, femininity and individuality. In addition to her practice she runs the online photography gallery Streit House Space and the Instagram residency program Streit Lab. She received her MA in photography from the London College of Communication and her BFA in photography from Purchase College.
Jesse Koechling (Brooklyn, NY) explores themes of solitude, perception, memory, time, and humans’ place within nature.
Demetris Koilalous (Athens, Greece) is a photographer specializing in portraiture. He studied Town & Country planning and Geography in Edinburgh and London. Koilalous sees photography as way to expose the hidden layers of reality and pose questions about space, people and their hidden relations.
Inzajeano Latif (Glasgow, Scotland) is most often described as a ‘portrait photographer who engages with people on the fringes of society,’ choosing to expose their intimate interactions with their environments, and looking at how those environments shape them. For him photography opens up a brave new world of exposure and insight in ways that words often fail to do.
Vinna Laudico (Montreal, QC, Canada) was born in Indonesia. Laudico received an MFA from the Academy of Arts University in San Francisco, California, and is now based in Montreal. Laudico’s work explores cultural difference and identity.
Giannis Manolis (Thessaloniki, Greece) graduated from the Metropolitan College of Thessaloniki in 2016 and since then has lived and worked in Thessaloniki. His photographs reveal a personal documentation of modern suburban Greek society and aims to highlight a transitional situation between past, present, and future.
Bradley Marshall (Nashville, TN, USA) is an artist working in photography and video. Originally from Nashville, TN, he is a 2018 MFA candidate at East Tennessee State University. He has held solo exhibitions at Fort Houston Gallery and Tipton Gallery, as well as numerous group exhibitions, including the Fogelman Galleries of Contemporary Art and 121 Gallery, among others. His series Hearing through Walls examines domesticity, lost youth, and American masculinity.
Lesia Marusahak (Ottawa, ON, Canada) is a Canadian artist whose photography-based artworks are printed on Japanese paper or fabric, hand-painted with egg tempera, natural and mineral pigments, wax and damar resin. Haunting imagery defines her practice which explores the confluence of space and time and issues of identity, mortality, and collective memory.
Sarah Pfohl (Greencastle, IN, USA) is an artist and teacher. Sarah earned graduate degrees from Syracuse University (MFA, Art Photography) and Harvard University (Ed.M., Arts in Education) and an undergraduate degree from Pratt Institute (BFA, Drawing). She utilizes photography, drawing, and writing to examine issues of teaching, schooling, place, and ability. Across this network of forms and fields, Sarah is particularly interested in making work that challenges dominant (oftentimes narrow, one-dimensional) representations of systemically marginalized groups or activities. A combination of reading and study in critical rural theory, disability studies, and critical educational theory in dialogue with Sarah’s personal experiences of rural places, disability, and classroom teaching currently inform her work as an artist.
Michalis Poulas (Sitia, Crete, Greece) was born in Athens, Greece in 1978. He studied photography at Leica Academy in Athens and later worked in the fashion industry. In 2003, Poulas established a photolab in Sitia, Creete, which he still runs.
Melissa Renwick (Tofino, BC, Canada) is a documentary photographer who covers stories on human rights, social justice and gender issues. Her work regularly appears in Canada’s leading newspapers like The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star. She has been named Photo Boite’s 30 Under 30 Women Photographers, an Emerging Photographer by The Magenta Foundation and Canada’s 2015 and 2016 Photojournalist of the Year by the News Photographers Association of Canada.
Chris Round (Sydney, Australia) is particularly interested in landscapes that convey surreal or fictitious narratives, and repeatedly focuses on human interventions upon the landscape that visually activate the surrounding space in strange and compelling ways. Round studied at Canterbury College of Art and the School of Communication Arts in the UK, as well as Sydney College Of Art in Australia.
Vera Saltzman (Fort Qu’ Appelle SK, Canada) primarily explores themes of identity, place, and memory. She is a graduate of the Portfolio Development Program at the School of the Photographic Arts: Ottawa (SPAO), and is currently based in Fort Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan.
Glen Scheffer ‘s(Nashua, NH, USA) images play between realistic representation and the imagined. Using a large and medium format camera, Scheffer constructs interpretations of what he sees around him. Scheffer lives in New Hampshire and teaches at the New Hampshire institute of Art.
Rob Stephenson (Brooklyn, NY, USA) is a landscape and architectural photographer whose work has been exhibited at numerous galleries and museums including The Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Center for Architecture, and The Museum of the City of New York. Stephenson’s first book, From Roof to Table, documenting the urban agriculture movement in New York City, was published in 2012.
Arnaud Teicher (Aix En Provence, France) explores terrains, forests and mountains in search of traces, be they drawn by time, shaped by climate or left behind by humans. His current series Wildfire examines the Sainte-Victorie area of southern France which has been ravaged by devastating wildfires in recent years.
Ewan Telford (Los Angeles, CA, USA) hails from Edinburgh, Scotland. His series The Ecology of Dreams centers around the Chengüchngech religion. His photography has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Die Welt, Bloomberg Business Week and others.
Dominic Turner (Dublin, Ireland) is a photographic artist & printer. In 2008, he set up an archival digital print studio called Exhibit A to service the needs of artists in Ireland. Dominic’s work is rooted in ‘exploration of an alternative way of seeing, both visually and intellectually, that conforms more to my emotional and philosophical response to the world around me than any attempt to document the world as it is.’
Julie Weber (Chicago, IL, USA) is a visual artist working conceptually within the framework of photography. Weber is interested in how images take form and materialize into physical objects. Predominantly cameraless, her work considers how materials can image themselves by depicting their own process. Through methodical application of color, shape, layering, and repetition, material and process are pulled to the fore where they are inseparable from subject matter.
Daren You (San Francisco, CA USA) is a Chinese photographer currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area. In his photographic process, Daren You uses several techniques to process the same image: reticulated film through a high temperature developing process, liquid emulsion, inkjet printing, darkroom printing and encaustic painting. Finally, the processes are merged as You rephotographs the prints with a film camera. His work has been published in LensCulture Magazine, i-D, Der Greif Magazine, Phases Magazine and the official blog of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
II Yuzu (Seoul, South Korea) photographs and writes about gender, love and sexuality. Her series lovefool is a personal love story about romance, body-modifciation, dreams, scars, and trauma.
This exhibition produced by FotoFilmic (Vancouver, Canada) is proudly presented in partnership with The Polygon Gallery (Vancouver, Canada), and The Reference (Seoul, South Korea).
FotoFilmic is a Canadian based arts organization created in 2012 that is dedicated to supporting emerging photographic artists through exhibitions and publications, as well as seminars, public talks and master workshops. Fotofilmic’s aim is to stimulate sociocritical dialogues all around the world on the place, role, and future of material practices in contemporary photography, while providing intercultural audiences with greater exposure and appreciation for photography.
