FOTOFEST BIENNIAL 2022
FOTOFEST BIENNIAL 2022
TEN BY TEN
TEN REVIEWERS SELECT
TEN PORTFOLIOS FROM
THE MEETING PLACE 2020-21
On view: September 24 – November 6, 2022
Artist Reception: Saturday, October 1 | 6PM
The Silos at Sawyer Yards
1502 Sawyer St., Houston, TX 77007
Alejandro González, 1:19 am, June 18th, 2005, Vedado, Havana from the series AM-PM, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.
FotoFest’s International Meeting Place Portfolio Review, held in conjunction with its citywide Biennial, is the largest and longest-running event of its kind in the United States. Every two years, 150 curators, editors, and photography and fine art experts travel to Houston to review 450 photographic portfolios by emerging and established artists and photographers from around the globe. The Ten by Ten exhibition is a celebration of this important site of discourse and display, highlighting the works of 10 artists, nominated by 10 guest reviewers, whose works exemplify the broad range of contemporary photographic practice.
Each of the artists in the exhibition is represented by the presentation of a single photographic series from their oeuvre. Diverse topics ranging from queer rights and Indigenous representation in media to unregulated commercial development and the erasure of complex histories are examined by the artists and further contextualized by a series of texts penned by the guest reviewers who selected them. The broad range of subjects featured in the exhibition reflects not only current attitudes in photographic praxis, but also those important issues and topics that appear in news headlines and frame the contemporary moment.
Ten by Ten: Ten Reviewers Select Ten Portfolios from the Meeting Place 2020–21 artists include: Nick Block, Zana Briski, Alejandro Gonzalez, Will Harris, Hillerbrand + Magsamen, Gregory Eddi Jones, Irolan Maroselli, Theresa Newsome, C. Rose Smith, and Larry Smukler. The reviewers that selected portfolios include: Nela Eggenberger, Teona Gogichaishvili, Mary Heathcott and Jacqueline McGilvray, Sam Mercer, Joaquim Paiva, Sinara Sandri, Serubiri Moses, Johan Sjöström, Paula Tognarelli, and Wendy Watriss.
This exhibition is organized by Max Fields and Annick Dekiouk.
TEN BY TEN Artists
Nick Block, Oil Painting
Nick Block is a visual artist and photographer from San Francisco, California who makes work about our relationship with the earth. He earned a BFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute and was the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship for photography. His work was recently featured in PhotoAlliance's 2020 Bay Area Current(ly) exhibition.
Selected by: Nela Eggenberger
EIKON - International Magazine for Photography and Media Art, Austria
Zana Briski, Animalograms
Zana Briski is an Academy Award-winning director and photographic artist. Her documentary film Born into Brothels won 36 awards and was the culmination of ten years of work, which began with her own photography in the brothels of Calcutta before teaching photography to the children of prostitutes. She founded Kids with Cameras, a non-profit organization which taught photography to marginalized children around the world. Zana’s current project REVERENCE is inspired by visions of a praying mantis. REVERENCE will be a traveling exhibit of large-scale photographic artworks, a film and music housed in a movable structure resembling a praying mantis eggpod. Bringing us face to face with insects as individual sentient beings, REVERENCE inspires wonder and awe, challenging us to re-envision our relationship to the earth and her creatures. REVERENCE will travel to city parks around the world.
Selected by: Johan Sjöström
Gothenburg Museum of Art, Göteborg, Sweden
Alejandro González, AM-PM
Alejandro González was trained in photography at the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne, Germany, where he received his degree in 2002. He has exhibited his work internationally at venues including the Alvar Aalto Museum in Finland, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Museé du Quai Branly in Paris, Kyotographie in Japan, among others. His work is part of the collections of the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis, the Museum of Latin American Art of Los Angeles and the National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba. Alejandro is concerned with issues such as individual freedoms, power and simulation. He uses photography as a tool to generate works of solid conceptual structure in tune with the sensibility of contemporary art. The subjects of his works range from documenting subjects of discriminated minorities, to arranging scenes with actors, and representing fictitious worlds meticulously constructed in his studio.
Selected by: Joaquim Paiva
Photographer and Collector, Rio de Janeiro
Will Harris, Nana
Philadelphia-based artist, Will Harris, received an MFA in Photography and Integrated Media at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA in 2019. That year, Harris was also selected as a finalist in Photolucida’s Critical Mass Top 50 and was awarded their MFA Student Scholarship. Will has exhibited in the USA, India, and Denmark. In early 2020 he received a Black Creative Endeavors Grant, awarded by Something Special Studios in New York. Will's first monograph You can call me Nana is published by Overlapse, an independent visual arts and photo books imprint based in London UK.
Selected by: Serubiri Moses
MoMA PS1, New York City, New York
Hillerbrand+Magsamen, 147 Devices for Integrated Principles
Hillerbrand+Magsamen’s practice utilizes collaboration, process and media experimentation through video, photography, installation, sculpture and interdisciplinary performance. They explore their relationships to each other and society with an uncanny sensibility that merges the real and unreal, blurring boundaries between life and art and often includes their two children, Maddie and Emmett.
Hillerbrand+Magsamen’s work has been presented at festivals including Ann Arbor Film Festival, Fusebox Festival (Austin, TX), CounterCurrent Festival (Houston, TX) and Diffusion Photography Festival (Wales, UK). Exhibitions include the Grand Rapids Art Museum (Grand Rapids, MI), Everson Museum (Syracuse, NY), and Center for Photography Woodstock (Woodstock, NY). They have received grants from Sustainable Arts Foundation, Austin Film Society, Houston Arts Alliance and Experimental Television Center and participated in residency programs: Wassaic Projects (Wassaic, NY), Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), I-Park (East Haddam, CT), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (New York, NY), Experimental Television Center (Owego, NY), Elsewhere (Greensboro, NC), Lawndale Art Center (Houston, TX) and Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM). Stephan Hillerbrand is an Associate Professor at the University of Houston. Mary Magsamen is the Curator at Aurora Picture Show.
Selected by: Teona Gogichaishvili
Kolga Tbilisi Photo, Tbilisi, Georgia
Gregory Eddi Jones, Promise Land
Gregory Eddi Jones is a photographic artist based between Philadelphia and New York. Jones' work interrogates politics of common cultural images through strategies of appropriation and re-authorship. Much of his practice is defined by visual criticism, dark humor, cultural commentary, and the updating of photographic traditions for the current day. Jones has exhibited his work internationally and throughout the United States, including Asama International Photo Festival (Miyota, Japan), Photoforum Pasquart (Biel, Switzerland), Deutsche Borse AG (Frankfurt, Germany), Beaconsfield Gallery (London, UK), and Red Hook Labs (Brooklyn, NY), among others. His self-published books are held in numerous institutional photobook collections, including libraries at Museum of Modern Art, The Met, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Victoria & Albert Museum, and Yale University, among many others. Jones was named a Foam Talent in 2018, was a Paul Huf Award nominee in 2021. In Fall, 2021, he published Promise Land with SPBH Editions, for which he was shortlisted for the Images Vevey Book Prize. Jones’s work has been published in numerous international publications, including The Guardian, VICE, British Journal of Photography, Foam Magazine, Wallpaper, Blind, Humble Arts Foundation, Creators Project, Fisheye, Revista Balam, and IMA Magazine, among others.
Selected by: Sam Mercer
The Photographer's Gallery, London, United Kingdom
Irolan Maroselli, La estafa
Irolan Maroselli is a Cuban visual artist who interrogates the complex relationships between Cuban national history and the reoccurring nature of social, cultural, and political issues taking place in Cuba today. He received his bachelor’s degree in History from University of Havana. In 2013 he exhibited his work in the Nordic Light Festival of Photography (Kristiansund, Norway) and in 2019 his work was presented alongside the works of other notable Cuban photographers in the KG+ Kyotographie International Photography Festival (Kyoto, Japan). In 2018 he presented a solo show titled En el día del padre at Fototeca de Cuba (Habana, Cuba). In 2019 Maroselli was awarded a fellowship from the Foundations for Civil Society that allowed him to present his work in the FotoFest Biennial 2020 Meeting Portfolio Review for Artists program. In 2020 he was invited to share his work at the FestFoto festival of international photography portfolio review.
Selected by: Sinara Sandri
Festival de Fotografia (FestFoto POA), Porto Alegre, Brazil
Theresa Newsome, Objects
Theresa Newsome is an interdisciplinary photographer whose work explores the concepts of racial identity, history, and gender. She explores significant instances of African American history and its underlying effects on contemporary black culture. Her work has been exhibited at 500x Gallery in Dallas, TX, multiple galleries throughout the United States, and has been featured in the 2019 PhotoSeptiembre Photography Festival (San Antonio, TX). Her research and work have been published in the 2018 edition of Focal Plane Magazine, Photo Emphasis, and Dallas Voyage Magazine. She currently works as an artist and lecturer in San Antonio, TX.
Selected by: Wendy Watriss
FotoFest, Houston, Texas
C. Rose Smith, Scenes of Self: Objecting Patriarchy
C. Rose Smith, who uses she/they pronouns, is a lens-based artist based in Rochester, NY. Smith is currently an MFA candidate at the Rochester Institute of Technology wherein they are researching the intersection of fashion, representation, and identity as part of their thesis project titled, Scenes of Self: Objecting Patriarchy. This project specifically interrogates the patriarchal semiotics present in the white shirt. Their research is grounded in the mining of photographic collections at the George Eastman Museum, Image Permanence Institute, and Library of Congress to engage histories past, present, and future. Smith holds a BFA in Photography from the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, Georgia. Their achievements include receiving the City of Atlanta’s Emerging Artist Award, a top five finalist for the Artadia Award, a finalist for the Aperture Magazine Portfolio Review Prize, finalist for FotoFest Meeting Place Portfolio Review, and being recognized as a 2022 Silver List Emerging Photographer. Their work has been featured in group exhibitions at FotoFest Biennial 2022 (Houston, TX), Blue Star Contemporary (San Antonio, TX), RIT City Art Space (Rochester, NY), Mason Murer Fine Art Gallery (Atlanta, GA), and SCAD Museum of Art (Savannah, GA).
Selected by: Mary Heathcott and Jacqueline McGilvray
Blue Star Contemporary, San Antonio, Texas
Larry Smukler, Immediate Whole
Larry Smukler is a New Hampshire-based artist who received his MFA from Maine Media College in May of 2019. Smukler’s initial work was in the street, but in response to his wish to be less of an observer and also as a response to his wife’s decline from Alzheimer’s, he turned inward. Smukler’s photographs transform ordinary moments into expressions of mystery. In 2020, he was named as a finalist in the LensCulture Exposure awards. His work has been exhibited at Pascal Hall (Camden, ME), the Maine Media Gallery (Rockport, ME), the Griffin Museum (Winchester, MA), the A Smith Gallery (Johnson City, TX), the Center for Photographic Art (Carmel, CA), the Robert Lincoln Levy Gallery (Portsmouth, NH), and online at the PhotoPlace Gallery. Smukler’s work has also been featured in several publications, including Malde and Ware’s Platinotype (Making Photographs in Platinum and Palladium with the Contemporary Printing-out Process), FLOAT Magazine, and Bonjour Paris.
Selected by: Paula Tognarelli
The Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, Massachusetts
FOTOFEST BIENNIAL 2022 SPONSORS
Principal Sponsorship for the FotoFest Biennial 2022 Guide
Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation
FotoFest Biennial 2022 Major Institutional and Individual Sponsors
Houston Endowment, The Brown Foundation, Inc., The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, The Powell Foundation, Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, The Wortham Foundation, John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation, Susan Vaughan Foundation, Judith and Gamble Baldwin, Frederick Baldwin and Wendy Watriss, David and Martha Moore, FotoFest Board of Directors.
Additional FotoFest Biennial 2022 Support provided by
The Alta Arts, Arts District Houston, Aurora Picture Show, Bonhams, Deal Company, Foto Relevance, Foundation for a Civil Society, Heidi Vaughan Fine Art, Houston Cinema Arts Society, Houston Museum of African American Culture, iLand Cloud Services, Institut d'Estudis Baleàrics, The Menil Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Photography, Seoul, Musiqa, Paper City, Precision Camera, River Oaks District, Sawyer Yards, Silver Street Studios, The Whitehall Houston, WYNG Foundation.
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