Light Work Podcast

We’re Just Here for the Bad Guys chronicles Brian Van Lau’s relationship with his estranged father. Lau’s father was absent during his childhood due to his incarceration. After his release, he rebuilt his life in Vietnam, remarried, and gradually disappeared from Lau’s life. Nearly a decade later, Lau traveled to Vietnam following his father’s sudden illness, and learned of his terminal cancer. Du...

In her first US solo exhibition, Karolina Wojtas is sending us a conceptual care package, as an installation titled Made in Poland. Presented here are images of her family, friends, sometimes herself, kitsch objects, and folkish cultural treasures. These images are printed onto inkjet paper and textiles; soft sculptures, a video, and a text piece in the form of a letter together make up Wojtas’s o...

Sasha Phyars-Burgess: Everything Nice September 8–December 5, 2025 Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery Reception: Thurs, Sep 18, 5-7pm Sasha Phyars-Burgess’s photographic project  Everything Nice  traces her family history through Portugal, the Dominican Republic, Florida, and Louisiana, following the paths of sugarcane farmed on colonial plantations and the transatlantic slave trade in relation t...

Aaron Turner: The Archive as Liberation May 12–August 29, 2025 Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery Reception: Friday, July 25th, 5-7pm The Archive as Liberation  is a publication and exhibition organized by Aaron Turner (Light Work artist–in-residence, 2018, and Light Work exhibiting artist, 2021). Turner has gathered a unique group of artists and writers to engage in...

Nabil Harb’s project  Mater si, magistra no  (a macaronic phrase that translates as “Mother yes, teacher no”) presents photographs that describe and depict moments and scenes within his hometown of Lakeland in Polk County, Florida. This Central Florida location is both the backdrop and main character of Harb’s visual narrative: a story that emits surreal qualities which twist ideas of th...

In this exhibition, Nicholas Muellner offers up photographs depicting people pantomiming in a verdant landscape made complex with surreal lighting; these images are paired with an issue of Contact Sheet that serves as a guidebook to the exhibition. The text in Contact Sheet is wryly poetic and succinct, and loosely leads us from picture to picture. Asea takes us somewhere without making its destin...

According to the Laws of Chance: Group Exhibition May 31–August 16, 2024 Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery Reception: Friday, July 26, 5-7pm According to the Laws of Chance is a subtitle included in many works by the Dadaist painter Jean Arp that describes his systematic yet chance-driven method of creating his simple and playful paintings. Arp would let torn pieces of paper fall to the floor to determine...

In 1987, Sophia Chai immigrated to New York City from South Korea as a teenager without knowing English. Looking back, she has described that experience as feeling untethered to any internal compass that she could use to navigate her place in a new country with a new language. She visually explains these experiences to us by reinterpreting the Korean language’s characters in photographs that enabl...

The Sun Echoed Like A Song is an exhibition of photographs made in Eduardo L Rivera’s childhood hometown near the Arizona/Mexico border. Taking inspiration from light and heat, he has been exploring the personal histories of family, community, and environment throughout the last decade. eduardolrivera.com — Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media daylightblue.com Light Work lightwork.org Hosted on A...

In Shunyo Raja (Kings of a Bereft Land), Arko Datto’s epic three-part series chronicles the lives of those living in the world’s largest delta, variously known as the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna Delta. Climate change has rapidly put this immense region and its inhabitants in danger. Even as the artist summarizes the complexity and scale of the challenges confronting both, he knows his time with this...

Jenny Calivas' images breathe in photography’s liminal space between intuition and what words can only sometimes convey. Here is a photographer whose practice is consistently curious and rigorous. Her images can unexpectedly taunt us, at once generous and withholding, still and active. In so doing, Calivas wrestles and succeeds with a multitude of ideas—from the spiritual to the feminist to the ec...

Guanyu Xu’s Suspended Status depicts an artist caught in a web of red tape. The work on view for this exhibition comprises images from his ongoing series, Resident Aliens, as well as a large grid of images that he calls Suspension. Both bodies of work use visa status in the United States as a means of framing images that depict people who are suspended between countries and cultures. Their futures...

Samantha Box’s new body of work, Caribbean Dreams, is a series of complex studio still lifes of personal, familial, and regionally-referenced objects, heirlooms, fruits, vegetables, and plants, onto which she collages family and vernacular images, fruit stickers, packaging, and receipts. A departure from earlier methods and subject matter, the constructed, experimental, and unpredictable compositi...

Light Work presents "The Lottery" a solo exhibition of new works by Pittsburgh-based photographer Melissa Catanese. In "The Lottery," Catanese turns her attention to the tense and confusing state of contemporary politics and culture. Her images bring together large groups of people, barren caverns, natural forces, physical exertion, and eruptions both crude and colorful. The accumulated manic puzz...

Futari (Two Persons) is an exhibition of photographs depicting the ongoing relationship between the artist Pixy Liao and her Japanese partner and muse Moro. Liao met Moro at the University of Memphis in 2005 while attending graduate school, where she invited Moro, who is five years younger, to model for her. In some ways, this served to reverse expectations that women seek older and wiser men. Fro...

In his new exhibition, Object Lessons, artist James Henkel looks back over thirty years of image-making, following a conceptual and formal thread that ties his work together and seems to stubbornly insist on resurfacing. Whatever is discarded, broken, and damaged draws Henkel to it. The objects he collects, assembles, or deconstructs are humble, common, and often no more than the scale of the huma...

Clifford Prince King is a self-taught queer Black photographer from Arizona. The images in this exhibition focus on King’s life in Los Angeles. In his work, King’s lifestyle and experiences are starting points to explore desire, intimacy, and day-to-day life with HIV. King’s images chronicle himself and others located in lamp-lit domestic settings. We see a brotherhood of men enacting moments of d...

Meryl Meisler: The Best of Times, Worst of Times March 22 - July 23, 2021 Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery In Light Work’s early days, during the 1970s and 80s, many artists arrived for their month-long residency with no specific plans for using their time. With only a camera and a vague idea of exploring, they walked the streets of Syracuse, open to the synchronicity of what might happen. Incredible pho...

Aaron Turner: Black Alchemy, Backwards/Forwards January 25 – March 4, 2021 Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery Light Work will exhibit more than 20 works by Arkansas–based photographer Aaron Turner in its first main gallery show of 2021. Aaron Turner: Black Alchemy, Backwards/Forwards will be on view in the Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery. In the solitude of the studio, the artist is never alone. Quite the contra...

With great pleasure, Light Work presents Heroine, a solo exhibition of work by Mexican-British multimedia artist and visual anthropologist Alinka Echeverría. Heroine is the culmination of the artist’s extensive research into the representation of women and femininity since the origins of the medium of photography. “With few exceptions, the place of women was before the lens, not behind it,” she ac...

Light Work presents Queens-based artist Matthew Connors’ General Assembly. This exhibition comprises 650 portraits that span the first year of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) in New York City. An expansive project that pairs individual black and white portraits within a tightly formatted grid, General Assembly borrows its title from the movement’s term for its horizontal decision-making process. Connors...

Pacifico Silano’s The Eyelid Has Its Storms… borrows its title from a Frank O’Hara poem. O’Hara’s musings and observations about everyday queer life inspired Silano’s artistic practice. “The eyelid has its storms,” the poem begins. “There is the opaque fish-scale green of it after swimming in the sea and then suddenly wrenching violence, strangled lashed, and a barbed wire of sand falls onto the s...

November 4 – December 12, 2019 Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery Gallery Talk: Thursday, November 14, 6pm Reception: Thursday, November 14, 5-7pm Wendy Red Star makes art that arises from her Native American cultural heritage and family history, as well as her expansive interest in photography, video, sound, sculpture, fiber arts, and performance. Red Star’s artistic practice involves ongoing research int...

August 26 – October 17, 2019 Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery Artist Talk & Panel: Friday, October 11, 6pm Reception: Friday, October 11, 5-7pm Since 2010, the Italian photographer Nicola Lo Calzo has traversed Atlantic coastal areas to research buried memories of the African Diaspora. His latest project, Bundles of Wood documents the rich local history of the Underground Railroad in Central New York...

March 18 – July 27, 2019 Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery Gallery Talk: Friday, March 22, 6pm Reception: Friday, March 22, 5-7pm Light Work is pleased to present Robert Benjamin’s River Walking, a solo exhibition of photographs and poems spanning four decades. A self-taught photographer and poet, Benjamin’s work, often centered around his family, offers a simple and honest consideration of what it means...