Silver Eye

This exhibition highlights the award winners and honorable mentions from Fellowship 22, our annual call for entries. This year’s awards were juried by a panel consisting of Dan Boardman, Executive Director of Light Work, Syracuse, New York, Brian Paul Clamp, Director, ClampArt, New York, New York, and Helen Trompeteler, a curator and writer specializing in photography.

The Fellowship Award recognizes a rising talent or established photographer from anywhere in the world, and the Keystone Award is given to an exceptional photographer living or making work in the state of Pennsylvania. This year's Fellowship award winner is Carla Liesching and the the Fellowship Honorable mentions are Dylan Everett and Jenna Garrett. The Keystone Award Winner is Eva Alcántara and the Keystone Award Honorable Mentions are Jake Reinhart and Steph Foster

About the Winning Projects

Fellowship Award Winner Carla Liesching's, Good Hope, brings together cumulative layers of personal prose and found photographic material to recontextualize the gardens and grounds at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. An historic location at the height of the British Empire, now an epicenter for anti-colonial resistance movements, this place is also the artist's birthplace. The Cape's position at the mid-point along the 'Spice Route' was viewed with great optimism for its capacity to open up a valuable maritime passageway. The 'refreshment station' later established there set into motion flows of capital from 'east' to 'west'. Good Hope offers an intimate and critical examination of White supremacist settler-colonialism in the present.

Keystone Award Winner Eva Alcántara's James the River is a series that was created in Lehigh Valley, PA, where the artist lived for a year and a half after the pandemic began. The risograph printed images focus on the natural details that surrounded them. The pictures and text are earthy, sensual, and transporting. James the River document's Alcántara's journey in becoming more comfortable in their body and their struggles in feeling contained in place and in time. The text of James the River describes a central character who travels the forest with their cousin, seeking to understand themselves.

Through the use of photo-collage, still life, and photography Dylan Everett's pictures collapse figure and ground into surface. Drawing from a range of references – personal life, literature, art, and pop culture – the viewer is invited to decode his many symbols, or at least to try. Everett's work is often a homage to LGBTQ-identified creative figures, gay icons, and personal relationships. This series is held together by an aesthetic that strips away any sense of hierarchy among these symbolic gestures. There is no distinction between highbrow and lowbrow, personal or famous, historical or contemporary, but there is ample sensuality, and beauty.

Jenna Garrett's project, This Holy Hill explores spirituality and myth in America through the rural vacation town of Branson, Missouri. With a population of 11,400 nestled in the Ozark Mountains Branson has served as a much-loved tourist destination for more than a century. The region champions a particular set of American values, but above all, a belief its existence is blessed by God. Garrett was born an hour north of Branson. As a child, she visited several times a year. Her work examines the foundation on which she was raised. Today, this culture sits at the forefront of American politics and the current health crisis. Through a combination of documentary and staged images, she creates a nuanced portrait of a worldview often oversimplified.

Stephen Foster's The Eyes Beneath the Oak examines how the American prison system renders people invisible and inaudible so that their stories are hidden from our collective understanding and how this allows the perpetuation of exploitative and abusive systems that disproportionately affects people of color. Foster's work is inspired by his own family, and their collective and individual negotiations of his aunt’s incarceration for the last eight years. For Foster, the disproportionate jailing of black men and women tells a story about a legacy of degradation and dehumanization that began in slavery and continues today. The Eyes Beneath the Oak seeks to empower others in similar positions to participate in self-authoring, and creating an image of blackness that is complex, messy, painful and sometimes contradictory, but also joyful and resilient.

The title of Jake Reinhart's newest body of work, Laurel Mountain Laurel, is an imperfect palindrome and the photographs are an act of interpretation inspired by what is lost in translation. These pictures are informed by a history of erasure and exploitation and an attempt to articulate the significance of place and the life inhabited there. Laurel Mountain Laurel is a lyrical yet firmly grounded photographic exploration, and at it's heart is depiction of the Youghiogheny (Yawk-eh-gain-ee) River Watershed. One surviving translation of the word Youghiogheny is four streams. Reinhart has been along those four streams, watched how they come together; losing their specificity yet retaining what is inherent to each - creating something larger and joining places and people that would otherwise appear disjointed and separate.

Participating Artists

1. Carla Liesching is a South African interdisciplinary artist working across photography, writing, collage, sculpture, bookmaking and design. Grounded in experiences growing up in apartheid South Africa, her work considers the intersections of representation, knowledge and power—with a focus on colonial histories and enduring constructions of race and geography.

2. Eva Alcántara (they/them/theirs) born in 1997, is a Dominican transgender artist working with images and text. Their work attempts to illuminate the gaps between objects and the words we use to describe them in order to find limitations in language. They love to create worlds through images and tell poignant stories about themselves and their friends.

3. Jake Reinhart is a photographer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Born and raised in Southwestern Pennsylvania; his work is informed by the region’s history and explores the importance of place in relation to the formation of identity and community. His book Laurel Mountain Laurel was published by Deadbeat Club Press in 2021.

4. Steph Foster is an interdisciplinary artist specializing in photography, with interests in video, installations, music, digital fabrication, sculpture and performance. His work combines sound and music with visual media to tell stories of mass incarceration and reconciliation within urban communities.

5. Jenna Garrett is an artist living in San Francisco, California. Her current practice focuses on the Ozarks in southwest Missouri where she was born. Garrett is interested in spirituality, mythmaking, and its consequences in American culture.

6. Dylan Everett is an artist/photographer working with still life and photo collage. He received an MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019, and a BA in Visual Art from Brown University in 2016. In 2021, his work was shown in a solo exhibition at the Griffin Museum of Photography (Winchester, MA) and in a virtual solo exhibition at Shelter in Place Gallery (Boston, MA). He was awarded an honorable mention for Fellowship 22, and exhibited at Silver Eye Center for Photography from May 5–Aug 6, 2022.