UNB15! Artist Features: V
UNBOUND15!
July 1 – August 8, 2026
CHRISTA BLACKWOOD • MICHAEL VALIQUETTE • ALEXANDER LAURENT RUBALCAVA • ALVIN LESTER • LALI KHALID • DAVID ZHENG
CHRISTA BLACKWOOD | BROOKLYN, NY
Gelatin silver print with hand marbled finish,
framed 11.5 x 13.5 inches.
Unique
$950
For over a decade, my artistic practice has been rooted in an ongoing exploration of gender, power, and representation. Since 2013, I’ve worked almost exclusively with a core group of male collaborators— Sam, Blake, Morgan, Richard, and Matt—reimagining the visual language of the photographic figure study.
Our process often begins with a twist: the models themselves select reference images from a vast archive of historical figure photography— images that, more often than not, depict women through the lens of male photographers. This reversal is intentional. We’re engaging with, and subtly subverting, a canon shaped by artists like Weston, Stieglitz, White, Callahan, Newton, Man Ray, Gowan, and Gibson. Their work becomes both inspiration and foil—material for homage, critique, and transformation.
The photographs are created using large-format film cameras, both in studio and on location. The final works span silver gelatin prints, photogravures, and platinum prints on vellum. Many of the silver prints are uniquely toned with Benadryl or layered with marbling and hand- painted interventions—each piece a tactile, alchemical object.
Our collaborative journey has taken us across the American landscape— from the surreal dunes of White Sands, NM, to the sculptural rock formations of Garden of the Gods, CO; from the lush Piney Woods of East Texas to the haunting bayous of Louisiana; from Moab’s red earth to the windswept Texas Gulf Coast, standing in for the iconic dunes of Oceano, CA.
This body of work is as much about reclaiming gaze and agency as it is about beauty, vulnerability, and the shifting terrain of masculinity. It’s a living archive of collaboration, reinterpretation, and resistance.
My History of Men: Sam, 2025. Gelatin silver print with hand marbled finish, framed 11.5 x 13.5 inches. Unique. $950
Christa Blackwood is a photo, film and text based artist working with themes related to identity, history, and popular culture. Raised in Oklahoma City and New Orleans, Blackwood now lives and works in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She received a Master of Arts from New York University and Bachelor’s degree in Classics and Filmmaking from The University of Oklahoma. She has exhibited her work since the early 1990’s, most notably at The Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Ogden Museum, The Houston Center for Photography, The Institute of Fine Arts NYU, San Francisco City Hall and the Contemporary Austin. Her work has been featured in many publications, including The New York Times, The Chicago Sun Times, The
Village Voice, Lenscratch and Art Desk Magazine.
Blackwood teaches photography at Colorado college and also founded and managed The Children’s Photographic Collective, offering free low-cost photo and literacy workshops to elementary through high school students in New York City and Austin, Texas.
MICHAEL VALIQUETTE | TROY, NY
Ladybugs, 2025. C - Print, 20 x 16 inches. Edition #1 of 5. $1,500
The only artwork my family owned when I was growing up was a Thomas Kinkade wall calendar that remained permanently open to November 1996. The image, The End of a Perfect Day II, shows a cabin near a river with an eager dog in the foreground awaiting the arrival of a paddling of ducks. Despite the calm facade, I always had the distinct feeling that this image, depicting a moment just before dark, captures the instant before a life-altering entity enters the frame. My father was a police officer who primarily communicated through a series of grunts, eye rolls, and coded gestures. On rare occasions, when something he witnessed at work was too momentous to bury, he recounted scenes of devastation and loss at the dinner table. He would fixate on the setting and the arrangement of objects: the uncanny shape of a car’s front end after impact or intricate burn patterns on wood and metal. The cause always remained undescribed or unnamed. And nothing breeds anxiety like the unknown.
The past is just a nightmare I am trying to wake up from is the ongoing series of photographs I am submitting with this application, an attempt to confront the power of the unknown. These images are rooted in personal narratives, often blurring the lines between fact and fiction, between memory and projection. Drawn to the contradictions that exist in the nuances of the everyday—between beauty and dread, control and unraveling, presence and absence—my practice revolves around searching for meaning and emotional clarity, moments when something ordinary becomes cinematic, poetic, or quietly unexplainable.
Michael Valiquette is a multidisciplinary artist, photographer, book maker, and graphic designer, based in Troy, New York. Michael makes photographs that integrates border politics, accessibility, separation, secrecy, intimacy, and the complexities of human nature. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Siena College and has worked as a Graphic Designer and Photographer at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).
ALEXANDER LAURENT RUBALCAVA | NYC
Archival pigment print,
31.25 x 38.25 inches, framed
Edition #1 of 5
$8,000
Driggs, 2023. Archival pigment print, 31.25 x 38.25 inches, framed. Edition #1 of 5. $8,000
In modern public discourse, there are largely two contrasting depictions of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, colloquially known as the Mormon Church: satirical takes on the cultural oddities and polygamist fundamentalists, with little in between except for Mitt Romney, Steve Young, and the Osmonds. I left the faith at 16 and have had to deal with the rift it caused in my family for the better part of half my life. While I have little desire to be affiliated with or connected to a faith which I renounced, I recognize that most of the parts of myself that I consider to be positive character traits come directly from my upbringing within that culture. It was my parent’s values—which in turn were the Church’s values—which helped make me the person I am today. My aim is to bridge the gap between these two extremes and offer a nuanced approach to the culture and social aspects of an oft misunderstood faith. All of the people in these images are my immediate and extended family and have eagerly agreed to participate in my endeavor. Most are devout, some are wavering, and few—if any—have left. Their stance in the church is secondary to their affiliation, which is an identity that cannot be easily shed, no matter how far one wishes to stray from the church and its culture. With these images I aim to be neither Mormon apologist nor critic. I offer no theological answers nor cultural condemnations, and instead urge the viewer to meet these people where they are, as friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors. The people in these images span from Utah and Arizona down to Chihuahua, Mexico. Hopefully those within the church can see themselves, their family, and their peers in these images; those outside of it will hopefully learn something new about their fellow citizens. It is a faith and a culture which exudes Americana and wears it proudly on it’s chest, even though it exists at the edges of what most consider to be “American”.
Alexander Laurent Rubalcava studied photography at Yale University. While at Yale he received the Harvey Geiger and Thomas C. Berry Travel Fellowships to travel to Chihuahua, Mexico, to document the Mormon Colonies. That work, coupled with years of documenting Mormon families in Utah, will comprise his upcoming monograph, Come, Come, Ye Saints. From 2024 to 2026 alexander was the Photographer-in-Residence for 1906 Group and Clark Construction’s The Art of Building, a residency program focused on construction labor throughout the United States.
alexander lives in New York City, where he works on long-form documentary projects focused on the relationship between people, labor, and ideology.
ALVIN LESTER | VIRGINIA
JACKIE, 1992. Gelatin silver print, 11 x 11 inches. Open edition. $1,200
CROSSWALK, 1992. Gelatin silver print, 11 x 11 inches. Open edition. $1,200
Virginia native Alvin Lester's lifelong interest in photography has resulted in degrees from NCCU and VCU, a portrait studio in Durham and gallery in Richmond, and time as an educator in photography and design. Lester has established a reputation for using the medium to shine light on Black communities, like North Carolina's Soul City and Richmond's Jackson Ward, once known as the "Harlem of the South.
LALI KHALID | CHICAGO, IL
It floats in silence, 2026. Archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches, mounted. Edition #1 of 3. $4,000
Archival pigment print,
20 x 30 inches, mounted
Edition #1 of 3
$4,000
In Absence, a Trace is both a personal excavation and a broader inquiry into the politics of visibility, what is preserved, what is erased, and how I can intervene in those silences. It is shaped by displacement, and the quiet ways it marks a life. I think a lot about what we carry when we leave, what gets passed down, what slips away, and how identity is constantly being reshaped in the in-between. Home, for me, has never been fixed. It exists more as feeling than place. The work is a way of mapping that, through image, sound, and text, without forcing it into resolution.
Displacement leaves behind gaps. My work doesn’t try to fill them. It stays with the tension—between what’s known and what isn’t, what’s visible and what’s felt. In that space, I try to build a kind of visual language that can hold both loss and presence. Never a full account, but only a trace.
DAVID ZHENG | BROOKLYN, NY
Gelatin silver print,
20 × 14 inches
Edition #1 of 10
$2,500 framed
Snake and Arm, 2026. Gelatin silver print, 14 x 20 inches. Edition #1 of 10. $2,500 framed.
Gelatin silver print,
20 × 14 inches
Edition #1 of 10
$2,500 framed
Tabula Rasa, 2026. Gelatin silver print, 14 x 20 inches. Edition #1 of 10. $2,400 framed.
Some Sorta Paradise is an ongoing body of work that constructs a psychological vision of New York City. Far from a direct representation, the work distills the City’s atmosphere; its density, velocity, and spatial compression, into environments that hover between abstraction and familiarity. The title draws loosely from the story of the Garden of Eden, not as a literal reference but as a framework: the idea of "Paradise" as a projection and as a space shaped by individual promise, desire and ambition. To me, New York is the most surrealist place. The city symbolizes this strange mythical garden constructed by aspirations and instability.
David Zheng (b. 1985) is a photographer based in New York City. Working primarily with silver gelatin prints, his practice engages constructed environments and the quiet tension between space, form, and human presence. Rather than narrative or direct representation, his images gravitate toward abstraction, using structure, light, and restraint to suggest relationships rather than describe them.
Rooted in analog photographic processes, Zheng’s work is shaped by an interest in materiality and the balance between chance and control. The physical qualities of photographic materials does not perform as a means to an end, but inseparable from questions of presence and time, allowing relationships to emerge without narrative.
The work centers presence over conclusion, inviting sustained attention to material and time as a shared, unfolding experience.
His photographs and artist books are held in private collections throughout the United States, as well as in institutional collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, and the Center for Book Arts.
Zheng works out of his darkroom in Brooklyn, New York.
