The Radial Survey Exhibition at the Silver Eye Center for Photography

The Radial Survey Exhibition at the Silver Eye Center for Photography by Aline SmithsonApril 15, 2019

©Nydia Blas, from the series The Girls Who Spun Gold

Some months ago I found myself on the Silver Eye Center fo Photography website. Silver Eye was one of the first organizations to award me a solo exhibition and support my career early on, something that I am grateful for. I was surprised by the new Silver Eye website as the site and the facility looked nothing like it’s previous incarnation. I discovered that the organization has had a major upgrade, into a world class photo center, thanks to significant support from the Irving and Aaronel deRoy Gruber Foundation as part of Silver Eye’s New Vision Campaign. Located in Pittsburgh, PA, “Silver Eye promotes the power of contemporary photography as a fine art medium by creating original exhibitions, unique educational programing, and a space for artists to learn, create, and connect through our digital lab. Our programs are dedicated to supporting the work of emerging, mid-career, and under-recognized artists and sharing that work with our diverse audience in engaging and meaningful ways.”

Recently a new exhibition opened at Silver Eye. Radial Survey is a new biennial exhibition that includes twelve photo based artists working within 300 miles of Pittsburgh. Radial Survey is on view at Silver Eye Center for Photography from April 4th – May 25th, 2019.

Silver Eye Center for Photography, Radial Survey 2019, Installation

Radial Survey is a new biennial exhibition of the preeminent emerging and mid-career photo based artists working within 300 miles of Pittsburgh. Our goal is to highlight work and support artists from places that are sometimes overlooked in the national photography conversation. The twelve artists selected for this inaugural survey live across this broad area and operate on their own trajectories with their own motivations, practices, and concerns. Radial Surve y is conceived not to identify a regional style or movement, but rather as a proposition: that working in this space encourages artists to engage with logics, flows, histories, and mythologies that differ from those defining the faster-moving densities of very large cities. It asks how this area, and this region, can be addressed as a place in and of itself.

The Silver Eye Center of Photography will be hosting a weekend long symposium on May 24th & 25th, 2019 entitled, Destiny of Place , to bring together artists from the exhibition, as well as curators and scholars from around the region, for two days of conversations on the exhibition’s work and the survey’s broader implications. The panel topics for this symposium include:

-Unwinding Definitions: Identity & Possibility
-Who You Are, Where You Are
-Construction & Revelation
-The Destiny of This Place

The Silver Eye curatorial team has selected twelve noteworthy artists with diverse practices, whose work engages with this region, it’s community, and it’s history. In addition to participating in this major biennial exhibition, the artists in Radial Survey will be the subject of an extensive exhibition catalog to be published in 2020.

Participating Artists include: Nando Alvarez-Perez, Morgan Ashcom, Nydia Blas, Melissa Catanese, Brendan George Ko, Jacob Koestler, Eva O’Leary, Lydia Panas, Ahndraya Parlato, Jared Thorne, Corine Vermeulen, and Susan Worsham.

On Friday, May 24 & Saturday, May 25th, 2019 there will be a Radial Survey Symposium: The Destiny of a Place held at the Silver Eye Center for Photography. Join artists from the exhibition and scholars from around the region for two days of conversations on the exhibition’s work and the survey’s broader implications. Registration is free, but space is limited so sign up today to secure your spot.

Panel topics include:
● Unwinding Definitions: Identity & Possibility
● Who You Are, Where You Are
● Construction & Revelation
● The Destiny of This Place

©Ahndraya Parlato

Ahndraya Parlato holds a B.A. in photography from Bard College and an MFA from California College of the Arts. In 2014, she published East of the Sun, West of the Moon with Études Books and in 2016 she published A Spectacle and Nothing Strange with Kehrer Verlag. She has also been a Light Work grant recipient and was a nominee for the Paul Huf Award from the FOAM Museum in Amsterdam. Her series on view at Silver Eye, Who Was Changed and Who was Dead, is based in Rochester, NY.

©Brendan George Ko

Brendan George Ko is a Toronto based visual storyteller who works in photography, video,
installation, text, and sound. In 2010, Ko received his BFA from Ontario College of Art & Design where he majored in photography, and in addition he practiced sculpture and curation. Ko’s work has been included in such events as The Magenta Foundation’s annual photography exhibition and publication, Flash Forward, the juried exhibition Hey! Hot Shot by Jen Bekman in New York City.

©Corine Vermeulen, from the series Your Town Tomorrow

Corine Vermeulen is a Dutch photographer who set up her studio practice in Detroit in 2006.
Her photographs have been featured in The New York Times, Brooklyn Rail, Time Magazine,
and The Guardian, among others. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions at national
and international venues including, a solo exhibition at The Detroit Institute of Arts, and group exhibitions at MOCA Cleveland, and Pier 24 in San Francisco. She earned a BFA from the Design Academy Eindhoven, a MFA in photography from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in
Michigan.

©Eva O’Leary, from the series Happy Valley

Eva O’Leary received her BFA from California College of the Arts in 2012 and her MFA from
Yale University in 2016. Using photography, text and video, her work investigates issues such as identity formation and human behavioral patterns on the backdrop of wider social, cultural and philosophical implications. Her series on view at Silver Eye, Happy Valley , is based in State College, PA.

©Jacob Koestler, from the series Interruptor

Jacob Koestler is an artist and musician from Johnstown, PA. He holds an MFA from the
Photography and Integrated Media program at Ohio University. His practice includes
photography, video and multimedia installation. Koestler is a co-founder of My Idea of Fun, an art and music archive that features over 350 releases, including his own albums and photography books. Koestler’s artwork has been exhibited and published throughout the United States and internationally. He currently lives and works in Cleveland, OH, where he is a lecturer in the Photography and Video Department at The Cleveland Institute of Art.

©Jared Thorne, from the series 26 Planned Parenthoods

Jared Thorne holds a B.A. in English Literature from Dartmouth College and Master in Fine
Arts from Columbia University. His work speaks to issues of identity and subjectivity as it relates to class and race in America and abroad. Thorne is an Assistant Professor in the Art Department at The Ohio State University. Before joining O.S.U. Jared taught at the collegiate level in South Africa from 2010 – 2015. He has had solo shows both domestically and internationally.

©Lydia Panas, from the series Sleeping Beauty

Lydia Panas is an artist based in Kutztown, PA, working in photography and video. Her studio practice explores our collective societal relationship to women. She has degrees from Boston College, School of Visual Arts, and New York University/International Center of Photography. She is the recipient of a Whitney Museum Independent Study Fellowship and a CFEVA Fellowship. Her photographs are represented in collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Bronx Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago.

©Melissa Catanese, from APSIS

Melissa Catanese lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and is the founder of Spaces Corners, an
artist-run bookshop and project space. She has been editing from a vast collection of over
20,000 photographs belonging to collector Peter J. Cohen for some years, and is the author of Dive Dark Dream Slow (2012), Dangerous Women (2013), and Hells Hollow Fallen Monarch
(2015). Her work has been included in the Mulhouse Biennial of Photography, NoFound Photo
Fair in Paris, and at institutions including Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco and Aperture Foundation in New York.

©Morgan Ashcom, from the series What the Living Carry

Morgan Ashcom is an artist based in Charlottesville, VA whose work explores the tension
between invented and experiential narratives. Ashcom’s work has been exhibited and published nationally and internationally including two solo exhibitions at Candela Gallery and the Houston Center for Photography in 2018. Ashcom has been an artist in residence at Light Work and has taught at Western Connecticut State University, Ithaca College, University of Hartford, Cornell University and the University of Virginia. His work has been featured in The New Yorker magazine and Le Monde magazine.

©Nando Alvarez Perez, Seer and Seen are One

Nando Alvarez-Perez is an artist and educator based in Buffalo, NY. In 2014 he graduated
from the San Francisco Art Institute where he was awarded the Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Photography. Since then his work has been exhibited throughout the Bay Area and internationally, most recently at Material Art Fair in Mexico City, the Drake One Fifty in Toronto, Interface Gallery in Oakland, CA, and the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY, where he was recently in residence. He is the co-founder of The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, anarts and education nonprofit organization launching in Spring 2019.

Nydia Blas is a visual artist living in Ithaca, New York. She holds a B.S. from Ithaca College, and received her M.F.A. from Syracuse University in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. She currently serves as the Executive Director of Southside Community Center, Inc. She has completed artist residencies at Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and The Center for Photography at Woodstock. She has been featured in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Huffington Post, Dazed and Confused Magazine, Strange Fire Collective, Lensculture, Yogurt Magazine, PDN, Fotografia Magazine, and more.

Susan Worsham_from the series_Bittersweet on Bostwick Lane

Susan Worsham is a Virginia based photographer blurring the lines between autobiographical and documentary work. Her work captures the relationships and particularly difficult experiencesshe’s had while growing up in the American South. Her photography is held in private collections, and has been exhibited at the Corcoran Museum, The Photographic Center Northwest, and the Danville Museum, Virginia.