CANDELAR FEATURE: OCTOBER
OCTOBER 2026: Cooper Lott
October Candelar page featuring Lott’s image, Brothers, 2025.
Cooper Lott is a lens-based artist from Great Falls, Montana and current MFA student at Utah State University. Their work uses contemporary and analog photographic processes, archival and found imagery, risograph prints, and other material interventions to examine bittersweet nostalgia, imperfect memories, and nuances often left behind by family or life after leaving a high-demand religion.
About the work:
As I work with the archival imagery of my family and others, these lost and discarded memories are given new life and remembered for another moment. Now detached from their original context and owners, they are given new form and meaning. They are my collaborators, aiding me not to stop time, but to acknowledge its passage and create acceptance for what cannot last. As I continue to create, I am constantly reminded that the impermanence of memory isn’t a barrier, but a push to create a past worth mourning.
You can also check out Cooper’s work in Candela’s first Bingo exhibition, on view October 1 – October 24, 2026.
Introduced in 2022, the Candelar is a limited edition set of fine art photographic calendar cards juried through a free one-week open call. The Candelar card sets, printed in-house on Hahnemühle paper by Candela Photographic Arts, can be displayed pinned, clipped, framed, or propped.
