The Lens

“Nightlife in Renderville” is a single chapter of the forthcoming book, Renderville, A Guide, about a town that doesn’t actually exist. The exhibition is a collection of urban street photography, captured between dusk and dawn, and an exercise in worldbuilding after a traumatic brain injury. The project documents the rendering process of physical reconstruction and the challenges of relearning old skills, particularly the use of a digital camera. 

While street photography is inherently tied to improvisation, as in capturing luck through a lens, night photography is a unique challenge since available light changes constantly while navigating city streets. The... Continue reading Casey LeClair: Nightlife In Renderville

Artist Gary Beeber tells stories of people who have unique perspectives, typically contrary to social norms. In Michael Malone: A Portrait of an American Organic Farmer, Beeber’s film and photographs, taken between 2022 and 2023, showcase the life of Michael Malone, capturing the demands of routine farm life and how they conflict with the artist’s initial perception of Malone’s character. Beeber’s playful work highlights Malone’s personality, with the works providing a glimpse into Michael’s connection with the local Dayton-Centerville farming community, his relationship to organic food, and his views on the larger agricultural industry in America.

This exhibition explores invented, poetic spaces examining astronomical phenomena and the communicative nature of the heavens. Using a scanner as the lens, digital collages are constructed to suggest a fabricated reality exploring mysticism and creation through imagery related to the celestial, landscape, body, and mind. Taking inspiration from the classic zodiac and tales of the constellations, which some believe provide insight into a person’s history and future, an imaginary pictorial map is drawn. 

Analogous to how myths provided explanations to natural and perceived experiences, this work draws the viewer into a sphere of lore... Continue reading Tracy Longley-Cook: Paths of the Ecliptic

On Devil’s Promenade, a road located in southwest Missouri near Oklahoma and Arkansas, there is a stretch where people are likely to encounter the Spook Light, a scientifically inexplicable floating orb that moves, disappears, reappears, and sometimes splits in two or three. Community members know it well. Some search for it, while others keep their distance.

In Devil’s Promenade, photographers and Ozark natives Lara Shipley and Antone Dolezal blend the folklore and local history of their home region with present-day photographs of Ozark people, land, and interpretive images engaging the living mythology of... Continue reading Devil’s Promenade

Sean Wilkinson’s exhibition meditates on one of the primary functions that has developed within the zeitgeist of photography: the significance of objects, places, and histories that are often left unseen. Wilkinson has developed his own style from the complicated act of seeing, where images are deliberately shot out of focus, pointing out the lack of detail and opposing one of the most convincing virtues of photography: clear focus.

As the image is blurred, the viewer has to identify the subject to understand the meaning. Since the immeasurable detail of a photograph has astonishing power,... Continue reading Sean Wilkinson: Flora