EXHIBITION: Justin James Reed (Copy)
Candela Books + Gallery is excited to announce BRING A DATE, a celebration of nightlife and music from the mid-1970s to the present day. Through the lens of six established and emerging artists, the exhibition features both still and moving imagery that celebrates America after dark, from the boroughs of New York to the late night denizens of Los Angeles, Chicago and Virginia. Included in this exhibition are works by Michael Abramson, Bill Bernstein, Thurston Howes, Jessica Lehrman, Reuben Radding and Safi Alia Shabaik.
EXHIBITION: David Emitt Adams
Candela Books + Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by David Emitt Adams. The exhibition will open on Friday, September 6th and will be on view through Sunday, October 27th. Please join us for an opening reception and artist talks on Thursday, September 5th, from 5- 8 pm.
EXHIBITION: Justin James Reed
Candela Books + Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Justin James Reed. The exhibition will open on Friday, September 6th and will be on view through Sunday, October 27th. Please join us for an opening reception and artist talks on Thursday, September 5th, from 5- 8 pm.
ACQUISITIONS: UnBound8!
Candela Books + Gallery is excited to share with you the new additions to the Candela Collection. THANK YOU artists, contributors, attendees, volunteers, friends and family! This years’ UnBound8! fundraiser was the most successful one to date!
EXHIBITION: UnBound8!
UnBound! features a wide array of photographic techniques from both emerging and established artists, both locally and abroad. We are very proud to bring you a compelling selection of photographic work for the eighth year in a row!
EXHIBITION: Dear Leader
Dear Leader is a multimedia exhibition that casts a light on the existential weight of nuclear proliferation and the harrowing threat of nuclear violence. These fears generate a deep undercurrent of uncertainty that rests underneath our daily lives. The participating artists seek to provide personal reflections on the past and ask us to consider, if just for the moment, the present and future concerns of nuclear proliferation against our current geopolitical landscape.
BOOK RELEASE + EXHIBITION: Pine Tree Ballads
Pine Tree Ballads is a poetic memoir, featuring the artist’s daughter, wife, mother, and grandmother as a single protean character (or multiple characters?) vibrating in time, navigating the mysteries and menace of a shared ancestral forest. This deeply personal photographic sequence is part visual narrative of family myths and part origin story. Pine Tree Ballads is fueled by both truth and imagination, which, in many instances are the fundamental ingredients of our personal history. The “docu-literary” structure of this monograph celebrates and fully exploits the duplicitous nature of photography/text to be simultaneously interpreted as both fact and fiction. At the surface, this project explores the emotive, contextual, and material constructs of history, culture, personal identity, memory, and folklore.
OPEN CALL: UnBound8!
Candela Books + Gallery announces our eight annual invitational and juried exhibition: UnBound8! The summer group exhibition will feature work from a wide range of fine art photographers. This annual summer group exhibition is the only open call we hold each year and is dedicated to featuring a wide range of photographic artworks and fine art photography and artists’ books from 40-50 fine art photographers. UnBound! generates opportunities and exposure beyond the traditional group or juried show by providing a collection opportunity for artists.
EXHIBITION: Ervin A Johnson
Candela Gallery is pleased to open 2019 with #InHonor, a solo exhibition by Ervin A. Johnson. Spurred by personal experiences as a queer Black man and the killing of Black people across America, #InHonor is a series of photographic mixed media portraits that stand as a visceral response to racism and police brutality done to the Black body.
BOOK RELEASE + EXHIBITION: One Day Projects
Candela Gallery is pleased to announce its second collaboration with One Day Projects founder and creators, Eliot Dudik & Jared Ragland. One Day Projects promotes creative dialogue by challenging artists to collaboratively produce and publish innovative projects within a 24-hour time period. And light followed the flight of sound is their third collaborative artist book inspired by both the natural wonder and symbolic possibilities of the 2017 solar eclipse. The book features photographs by 52 artists and is presented as a 30-foot-long, hand-bound accordion with an enclosed saddle-stitched zine and essay.
EXHIBITION: Anne Arden McDonald
Candela Gallery is pleased to present ATOM | PLANET, a solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist, Anne Arden McDonald. Within this series McDonald creates photographic works imbued with celestial and atomic aesthetics. Approaching her darkroom process like a sort of alchemy, McDonald captures a dialogue nebulously drifting between mediums by testing materials and techniques through experimentation, noting variables, and observing the results, and amending processes.
EXHIBITION: Channels
Candela Gallery is pleased to present CHANNELS, a group exhibition featuring photographs and mixed media works by Courtney Johnson, Lisa Kokin, and Willie Anne Wright. The exhibition features three artists whose work evokes a transformative experience; each imbued with elements of salt, filament, or flora to create new forms.
CHANNELS opens September 7th with an artist reception on September 6th, from 5-8pm and runs through October 20th.
EXHIBITION: UnBound7!
Candela Gallery is excited to announce UnBound7!, Candela’s annual juried & invitational exhibition. UnBound! features a wide array of photographic techniques from both emerging and established artists, both locally and abroad. We are very proud to bring you a compelling selection of photographic work for the seventh year in a row!
JURIED ARTISTS: UnBound7!
A huge THANK YOU goes out to all who have submitted work to our UnBound7! exhibition. Again this year, we had a ton of great submissions to consider and we appreciate the opportunity to bring such an ambitious show to our audience here in Richmond.
EXHIBITION: Harrison Walker
In his first solo exhibition at Candela Gallery, Harrison Walker presents his Portals project, highlighting a mix of photographic processes through a series of abstract works. In Walker’s words, the series is “an investigation of photographic chemistry, psychological perceptions, and ideas of duplication, mimicry, and the multiple.” Through experimentation and discovery the varied effects of his photographic, printmaking, and drawing techniques, seek to elicit not only an emotional but also a fundamentally experiential viewing.
EXHIBITION: Chris McCaw
Chris McCaw returns to Candela Gallery in his second solo exhibition featuring work from his recent projects, as well as new work from his Sunburn series. Over the last decade, Chris has continued to push the boundaries of the photographic medium, sharing his unconventional techniques for capturing the movement and the power of the sun as it travels through his viewfinder. With hand-built cameras and vintage photographic paper, McCaw creates unique pieces documenting the sun’s movement through illusory land and seascapes. Long exposures throughout a day, or over multiple days, materialize as marks and burns made directly by the sun’s light as it exposes the paper. As McCaw writes, through this collaborative process, “the sun has become an active participant in part of the printmaking.”
A Message from Gord…
Good Thursday, All!
I want to take a moment to write a thank you and issue an update from the director’s chair. I used to write all of these Candela newsletters with an irreverent air, tucking in a photo koan or limerick but as with so many things, our operation has matured somewhat over the last 7+ years. And so have I, maybe? …pausing for the wave of existential nausea to pass… but we have been dancing pretty hard, trying to pull you onto the dance floor with us. And so, our general goal is to put out the most effective PR and messaging we can for the artists and institutions with whom we are partnering.
OPEN CALL: UnBound7!
Candela Books + Gallery announces our seventh annual invitational and juried exhibition: UnBound7! The summer group exhibition will feature work from a wide range of fine art photographers. An UnBound7! gala event, will raise funds to purchase select works from the exhibition. Works purchased by Candela through this event will subsequently be included in the Candela Collection.
The mission of the Candela Collection is to support photographers through the purchase of original photographic work and to actively pursue opportunities to donate said works to notable permanent collections.
EXHIBITION: Morgan Ashcom
Candela Gallery is pleased to announce our first solo show with Virginia-based photographer, Morgan Ashcom. The exhibition coincides with the release of Ashcom’s recent book, What the Living Carry, published by MACK Books.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” ― William Faulkner
Born and raised in Free Union, Virginia, Ashcom chisels his work out of the rural Americana of Hoys Fork – an amalgamated fiction of a small town, nestled in the South. Influenced by memories of his Shenandoah upbringing and deeply rooted in southern literature, Ashcom depicts landscapes obscured by climbing vines and dying brush, while everyday subjects perform menial tasks amongst their dated surroundings. Much like Faulkner’s mythical Mississippi-inspired county, Yoknapatawpha, Ashcom has constructed a place galvanized by the past – its resoluteness, and its refusal to be tied down or easily consumed.
POP-UP EXHIBITION: Steven Casanova
More than 4 months without electricity, without water — a crisis caused by a natural disaster, but made possible by over a century of U.S. colonialism. For about a million Puerto Ricans, this is still their daily reality. Without a vote in Congress, and with increasingly restrictive laws and regulation, the island has had little power in helping itself, becoming more dependent every day on outside help.
Day 155, 156, 157 is an educational experience, working to put the current crisis into perspective. The weekend programming will be composed of an exhibition of photographic and sculptural work, depicting the tragedy and the prevalent need in Puerto Rico. Proceeds from the exhibition will go toward helping small Puerto Rican farmers re-establish their farms and rebuild their communities.