ABOUT THE CALL

PH GALLERY + STUDIO invites photo-based artists to participate in the 5th Annual Juried Group Exhibition.

As humans it is in our nature to communicate. We communicate primarily through language, spoken word, written word, and through body language. Language, particularly the English language, is both expansive and limiting. Language can be gendered, exclusionary, and biased on many levels but it can also be inclusive, open and transformed by those who use it. Similarly, how you speak or what you say at any moment in time and in any given place can place you on the ‘inside’ or ‘outside’.

This exhibition seeks to explore how artists navigate existing in incongruent spaces, often known as code switching. Additionally, this exhibition seeks to explore the myriad of ways modern English language is coded and used to codify objects, places and people and how artists resist, change, defy, challenge external code hierarchies, patriarchies and the like.

Artists of color, Queer artists, differently abled artists, and those who are currently breaking new ground in their photographic practice are strongly encouraged to apply. Your finished work must represent a firm connection to the origins of photography but need not be a representational photographic object per se.

JUROR // AMANDA CHESTNUT //BIO

Amanda Chestnut’s work focuses on the representation of history – and in particular, how the history of race and gender impacts modern narratives. Her art has been exhibited in Rochester at Firehouse Gallery, Joe Brown Gallery, University of Rochester, and High Falls Art Gallery at the Center at High Falls.

She was formerly a resident at the Center for Photography at Woodstock in Woodstock, NY and at Genesee Center for the Arts & Education in Rochester, NY. She has held graduate assistantships at Visual Studies Workshop and the Criminal Justice Department, both at the College at Brockport in Rochester. Chestnut holds an MFA graduate of Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY.

As an artist interested in both upending and interpreting traditional definitions of the archive, she pairs archival images and text with contemporary imagery and her own perspective to convey the history, emotion, and lasting socio-economic impact of the past. Her previous works incorporate photographic poems that draw from archival imagery, text based poems, and Chestnut’s hair.

Most recently Chestnut curated “Verified” a group exhibition at Loud Cow in Spencerport, NY and the Rochester Biennial at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center (RoCo). To learn more about Amanda Chestnut, her personal artistic and curatorial endeavors visit amandachestnut.com.