Photographic Visions – Winter 2022
A curated international photography exhibition
January 13 – February 5 (1st session) and February 10 – March 5 (2nd session)
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Click on the thumbnail to view the image. Click on the image for a larger view and information.
Photographic Visions is a biannual exhibition at PH21 Gallery, showing mini-series of the works of selected artists who submitted their portfolio for our solo exhibition competition. Our aim is to celebrate the work of photographers whose portfolio is progressive and visionary, forwarding photography in the 21st century.
Photographic Visions – Winter 2022 presents three images (in the form of mini-series) from twenty photographers in two sections.
To find out more about the photographers, please click their names to visit their websites.
Please return in a few days to view and order an exhibition catalogue.
Exhibiting artists:
January 13 – February 5 (1st session)
Kostis Argyriadis is a photographer born in 1981 in Thessaloniki, Greece. His photography vision currently lies within the triviality of everyday urban and life patterns.
For a year and a half, the world was in the grip of a health crisis unlike any experienced in my lifetime. "Just another Alice" is a series of shadowboxes through which I explore the feeling of being trapped at home while struggling to find joy and hope. With these images, I indulge in small pleasures, and look beyond the walls to memories of past trips and promises of new experiences. But more than that, they are a testament to the power of imagination, and the joy and strength we can gain through weaving stories.
My collages start with prints of my own mannequins’ photographs. By adding snippets and cutouts from magazines, newspapers, pamphlets or any other print material I start creating tableaus that appear absurd and strange. I work on these collages without a conscious idea at first. They are mere fragments of a surreal world created by my subconscious. I then rephotograph the collages. Some of these compositions become more fantastical when I process them as negatives and some are more pictorial in black and white.
Lately, I have been taking photographs of reflections in windows. I started to do this in April 2020 just as the world started to shut down as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking back at some of these pictures, I now wonder if I was simply trying to see my immediate surroundings in an alternate way. Taking a photograph within a reflective surface instantly collages multiple planes of view and abstracts ordinary details. The resulting image offers the opportunity to escape the present reality and experience another perspective of the usual.
Lux in tenebris offers an intimate immersion that take the viewer on an unprecedented and intimate sea journey. . Vincent Jendly embarked on five merchant marine cargo ships to experience his ambivalent relationship with water, developed after having escaped drowning as a child. On his first trip, when Jendly sees an indeterminate glow on the horizon, he sees himself opening his eyes after his accident, in the bright light bathing his loved ones who are watching over him, and he sees life in death.
The Bride Who Ran Away is a series about domestic abuse and finding the courage to escape from it. It is also my story. (They are all my stories, but this one I truly lived, not imagined). We all know what a black eye looks like. I chose instead to use beautiful images to glorify the bravery of her departure.
Short artist statement: "My photographs are based on rebuilding my own life. Things that seem simple can become complicated, so I focus on the essentials in my pictures; no frills, no unnecessary, out of place things. I strip down and highlight the detail that everyone passes by, but without which everything would be empty. Our life is like that."
These works from my Dilemmas series are pondering on the relationships between different substances and forms of life. It also reflects on an inter-changeable play of color and form. Being inspired by ballet as a genre of art, Dilemma's works are artistic metaphors for some of philosophical questions, such as app, appreciation of different stages of life, transitions between yesterday and tomorrow, transformation of beauty. It is also an effort to preserve memorable moments. Or to create them.
I'm drawn to dark and psychological issues, to life changes and to a mix of vulnerability and strength. I strive to compile atmospheres, moods and feelings in my work. ‘Black Waves’ is an expressionistic and metaphorical project that explores the dark depths of grief. It’s a based on the true story of a friend of mine, who lost her 19 year old daughter Eva to suicide on a holiday with her boyfriend in France in 2012. The series is a personal visual interpretation of the 7 diaries full of grief that I received from the mother of Eva.
Literary symbolic photographer. Visual storyteller. Pure and poetic. Attention to detail. Sometimes balancing between realism and surrealism, often spiced with a touch of humor. Not staged but spontaneous photos. Always focused on the decisive and/or unguarded moment. I shoot with my soul, not with the camera. Please don't put me in a box.
February 10 – March 5 (2nd session)
David Carey
My project speculates on what it would be like if dinosaurs still roamed the world today and we had to interact with them on a day-to-day basis in an urban environment. This proved to be very difficult idea to implement technically as I needed to be able to place my dinosaurs at a variety of angles to fit their new environments. This meant working with 3D digital figures.
Peter Devenyi
When it is wondered what connects the individual to the outside world, and which ultimately allows for the vicarious experience of the subjective experience of other individuals—it might seem rather mysterious how such experience simultaneously is subsumed within the visual perception of the environment, allowing for not merely the recognition but the identification with of the complexity of thought and feeling.
These photographs in the project “Square #65- Other space” embody my feelings and experiences for 10 years. Through photography, I deal with a very personal experience of grief and loss. Feeling of externality, how your world is stagnant, but the world around goes on. “Life is like game of chess and suddenly you find yourself in Square #65”. As my way of working is based on random and unplanned photographing, I discovered the pattern of my photos taken trough these years and I picked up 21 to this project.
This work is part of a series titled "Color In Black and White (Trans_Lucent #3)".
As a photographer one of my challenges is that I am blessed with a condition known as Aphantasia. Merriam Webster defines Aphantasia as: “the inability to form mental images of real or imaginary people, places, or things.” I believe that the result of this is that my other senses inform my photography.
I am interested in questioning approaches towards photography, whether that's through presentation, how an image is constructed, or re-photography. I believe that for the medium to continue on, it needs to push ways of looking at and considering images; how they function in the 21st century.
"Folded Emotions" Project consists of a range of printed self-portraits about unfolded origami figures done by myself. Each piece of origami represents an animal associated to some aspects that I have been working for during all my evolution process, consciously. Self-portraits are the axes that have allowed me to immerse into myself and have accompanied me along the trip.
The Players, In To Wonderland and Wonderland are all taken from my conceptual series Curiouser and Curiouser. The series is influenced by the story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I was inspired to create this series from personally identifying with the theme of not belonging that features prominently in Alice’s narrative. In my series, the modern-day Wonderland of Las Vegas provides the backdrop for the protagonist to discover, struggle with, and eventually come to terms with her own feelings of not fitting in.
I use my camera to create life and to defy death. These three images are from my series “Animate.” They embody energy of that was present at the moment of capture and remains there now. They embody the moment when mass becomes energy, reminding us of our own transcendence — that rare moment of when we perceive ourselves to be infinite and immortal, a part of the universe, connected to and melded into everything else.
When capturing the beauty of flowers my work was always precise; however, the pandemic pushed me into a new technique. I found myself reaching for something more ephemeral; trying to capture the beauty in a non-realistic moment, somewhat liminal, escaping all that was going on around me.
A stele is a carved memorial tablet, decorated with relief images or text, with its formal proportions often echoing those of the human torso. The images in this series take these attributes of a traditional stele, but create them using a sheet of pinned and draped latex. The series, Stelæ, makes a knowing and inevitable connection between latex as a fashion material and its prominence in sexual subcultures such as sadomasochism.