On view May 1 through June 20, 2015, at Candela Books + Gallery is American photographer and digital artist Daniel Leivick. In his series, Heliopolis, Leivick layers source material from satellite imagery, revealing a fictional terrain. Leivick’s aerial photo-collages are fundamental to his practice of focusing on human interaction with the environment, expressing his concern of the newly analytical visual discourse that has transformed our society at large.

Amy Ritchie Johnson has curated Peripheral Vision as a fond farewell after her recent departure from the position of Associate Director at Candela Books + Gallery  which she held during its first years of operation. The exhibition essay (link below) is integral to the exhibition itself, describing her interest in exploring:

Candela Books + Gallery is excited to host an exhibition of works by internationally-acclaimed photographer, Cristina De Middel. Five Stories will include photographs from five bodies of De Middel’s work over the last five years. Starting out as a photojournalist, De Middel’s approach expands on the documentary platform to integrate fact and fiction through imaginative visual narratives.

Christa Blackwood began her career creating street installation art on gender and identity issues, landing her an early invitation from Kiki Smith and Lucy Lippard to join the Women’s Action Coalition. This inclination toward subversion of traditional gender politics is apparent in Blackwood’s most recent series of photographs included in this exhibition, Naked Lady: a dot red, The Boys of Collodion, and Girl. Blackwood employs a red sphere in each composition to indicate female presence. In Naked Lady, a red dot inserts itself into the grandiose tradition of male landscape photography. The Boys of Collodion flips the stereotypical artist/model relationship so that the female artist is photographing the idealized young male figure. And with Girl, Blackwood literalizes the faceless torso of a young woman within a pink circle. The red dot as symbol contains multi levels of female signification. In the context of landscape and portraiture created using historical photographic processes—the photogravure and wet collodion tintype processes—the simplified red “dot” creates a contemporary portal for examining our conditioned perspectives of gender, history, and the image.

Andy Mattern transforms the inconsequential materials of the photographer’s studio into a collection of formally composed objects, which he then documents photographically. Discardable photo paper boxes rife with corporate marketing cliché become geometric and abstract compositions when Mattern physically removes or redacts text and imagery found on the box. With a BFA in studio art from University of New Mexico and an MFA in photography from University of Minnesota, Standard Size is testament to Mattern’s artistic training. Using a ritual process of cutting and sanding stock imagery off surfaces, covering logos and text with various colored masking tape, Mattern delivers a new surface both contained and freed.

In Habitation, Pamela Pecchio utilizes the photograph as an insightful documentation of the physical and psychological spaces we call home. Recognizing both the poetry and the mundanity of our everyday surroundings, Pecchio continues, for over a decade now, to investigate “the habitat of the home, where we are able to let down our guard and express our most idiosyncratic habits,” taking special care to highlight our complex relationships with objects, color, light, space, and landscape. Though this series of photographs is devoid of actual people, the collected objects and imagery of the home offer a particular kind of portrait, as the dweller remains present in their inhabited space.

Brandon Thibodeaux photographs among five rural communities that span roughly 15 square miles in the northern Mississippi Delta. Towns like Alligator, Bo Bo, and Mound Bayou are historically rife with poverty and racism, but are also emblems of faith and perseverance today. Thibodeaux began the project as a personal exploration but encountered the universal; “While this work makes specific reference to the rural black experience, I am reminded that with every visit themes of faith, identity, and perseverance are common to us all.”

Lisa Elmaleh employs the 19th century wet collodion tintype process in her documentation of present-day folk musicians living in and around the Appalachian Mountains. Preserving the essence of a tradition tied distinctly to place, Elmaleh creates portraits and landscapes of haunting beauty. The subject matter and the chosen photographic process are paired purposefully, as Elmaleh explains; “The tradition of American folk music echoes in the historic nature of the tintype photographic process. As urbanization becomes more prevalent in America, American rural identity and culture become obscured.”