Programs and Schedules

-November 1 to December 17, 2023

-Yes, dinner tomorrow at home, Hailey Ip

This collection of film photographs explores my Chinese identity and more conceptually, center a multi-generational conversation about cultural preservation visually anchored through domestic spaces. The objects that live within the space, picked and placed by the dweller, drive me to photograph. The objects within the domestic space can tell the story of those who inhabit it. The nuances of how people arrange their homes can, in turn, create a window for viewers to find insight in these intimate spaces and relationships. My purpose in image making is to continue to document the lineage of the people around me. In the process of visualizing their lives — spending hours talking and working together in their own domestic spaces— the goal is for them to realize that their life is worth sharing with others. 

The theme of hands threads through the images, in various compositions. These gestures are small and fleeting. It is only when the hands have been caught in an act that we can appreciate and analyze what is happening in front of us. It is with our hands that we tell others how we feel. It is with our hands that we cultivate an intimate scene.

-My Wonderland, Cédric Roux

Manhattan is my photographic paradise: it's where I took my 1st photographs, where I feel most at home photographing and where I return regularly to show New York as I see it. This exhibition brings together images from my 1st book, published in 2022, as well as previously unpublished images taken after the book's release. Welcome to My Wonderland.

-January 3 to January 28, 2024

-After the Earthquakes, Serra Akcan, Fatma Çelik, Aylin Kizil and Çiğdem Üçüncü

ZînKolektif consists of Aylin Kızıl, Fatma Çelik, Serpil Polat, Gülşin Ketenci, Serra Akcan and Çiğdem Üçüncü. We have been working together since 2012 in the Turkey-based photographers’ collective NarPhotos and have continued our collaboration even after we had to disband the group in 2021. We strongly believe in the empowering and elevating aspect of group processes since everything we experience - and also witness via our lenses - is not only personal, but political. That’s why we are in the making of founding the first ever women and queer photographers collective Zîn (Kurdish for «life») in Turkey’s history. During this process, we have paid attention to understanding the issues that deeply affect us and the society we live in, documenting and narrating stories by using a visual language that is most natural to us. We predominantly produce photography and multimedia works focused on issues such as migration, environmental issues, gender, war, social injustices and urban transformation.”

-February 1 to February 26, 2024

-Movement Study 1: Street Ballet, Elizabeth Bick  

After a childhood dedicated to training in dance, I found a choreographic voice through photography. I photograph found urban facades that I position as stages, and pedestrians as performers – some consciously staged; most unconsciously so.  I am particularly drawn to spaces and people that are naturally theatrical.  The figures are sharply frozen in the pictures through the use of a very fast shutter speed. Through this stilling, dress, body movement, and backdrop transcend the quotidian urban space into that of an operatic performance piece. Movement Study I: Street Ballet is the result of locating public pedestrian spaces with no evident signage or specific location. I use various methods of play to capture seemingly banal fleeting movements as performances, i.e.- the subjects’ gestures, clothing, and the built or natural stage around them. Through architecture and piercing light, and this coexistence of strangers, I attempt to both create and capture the theater of passageways. The work becomes evidence of archetypes, as well as collective formations, made by pedestrians as their public selves. I also photograph from the window of my fourth-floor apartment in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  From the elevated vantage point, on a sunny day, the space appears stage-like.  In this work, I distantly directly collaborate with the participants and they make their awareness of the camera’s presence known in the picture.  They are instructed to dress and pose as they wish. This exhibition will present never-before-seen works, produced for the Eyes on Main Street fellowship.

-March 1 to March 31, 2024

-American Sketches, Ed Kashi

“The world is full of stories, and most of them aren’t true.” These sobering words came from a not-so-sober novelist friend at a party in San Francisco shortly before we began our road trip. At a time when our country seems turned inside out, Ed and I planned to hit the road in search of some truths. My friend disabused me of any notion of finding them. Instead, she offered a liberating reminder that stories are just that: stories. No more, no less. They are the bricks we use to build our communities, our jobs, our opinions, and politics. They are momentary facts, molded by perspective and solidified by selective memory. Ideally, they help us create a shared reality, a shared narrative.
 
We left San Francisco in pursuit of stories to help make sense of this moment in history, when common sense is uncommon, and the country appears to be at odds with itself. Convinced that life on the ground doesn’t resemble the processed reality we consume from afar, we set out to share the momentary truths we could witness, or better yet, the building blocks we would encounter along the way.
 
The following fragments are a few bricks we will build on. They are intended to be stories about people of a place at this time.

-April 3 to April 28, 2024

-It Was Forever Until It Was No More, Marylise Vigneau

"The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Man's struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Milan Kundera.

It was forever until it was no more"  focuses on countries that gained independence after the implosion of the USSR. Diverse and interwoven stories form a fragmented portrait of a geographical and mental space. It reflects on political utopias, their corruption, identity and memory, and people's independence and resilience. This long-term project aims to build a memento, an archaeology of the future, to better understand the history of these spaces and, therefore, the troubled present. It does not deny or forget the crimes and predations of a corrupt and totalitarian system. But it aims to counter the oblivion of what was, sometimes, furtively and imperfectly, an attempt to build a utopia. These images are a tribute to hopes, disillusions and the people who lived through them.

-Uzbekistan, Aun Raza

Uzbekistan is a two-sided postcard. On one side are the glorious remains of the Silk Road days and on the other side is the heavily lingering Soviet shadow which keeps getting crossed over by the seemingly distant dreams of American popular culture. Around New year days, Uzbek Islamic-nationalism takes the back seat and Santa Clauses roam around doing everyday jobs while dreams of a different world float in the air."

-May 1 to May 26, 2024, Parisa Azadi

-Ordinary Grief, Parisa Azadi

Ordinary Grief is a story of tenuous reconciliation. In 2017, I returned to Iran after 25 years of self-exile, where I embarked on a personal and political reclamation of my identity and history. With images spanning 2017-2022, Ordinary Grief is my attempt to reconcile despair and joy, exhaustion and hope. It’s about ordinary Iranians actively trying to create new futures for themselves despite the odds. It’s a love letter to a country from which I feel estranged, despite having been born there, and to the people who call it home.     As a woman who grew up between East and West, straddling the line between insider and outsider, my experiences are difficult, unromantic, and fragile. I’ve realized that two decades of living outside Iran brought with them a kind of cultural and personal amnesia. Ordinary Grief is also about what it means to forget and what it means to (try to) remember. Always, I’m attuned to joy, despite the hardships: I sought moments of serenity, celebration, and ritual in the shadows of perpetual grief. The photographs mark the passage of time as they document physical, emotional, and political limbo: they question what it means to long and to belong.

June 1 to July 28, 2024, The Residency Exhibition

-Photographs from: Claire Savary, France; Grace Ekpu, Nigeria; Svet Jacqueline, Russia-USA; Patrick Artinian & Louise Oligny, France, Canada; Julia Gillard, USA; Andrea Ratto, Italy; Jimmy Beunardeau, France; Matt Stuart, United Kingdom; Vincent Nguyen, France; Reins Hofmanis, Latvia; Kasia Strek, Poland; Céline Sarr, France

This is the last year of the Residency Program. It has been an incredible 7 years (with a short interruption caused by the covid pandemic). Since September 1, 2017, 69 photographers from all continents have come to Wilson, NC to create, for a month long each, a portfolio of the daily life in Wilson. When you thing about it for a second, give or take a few, it means that for 2500 continuous days we had a professional photographer looking at our community. The final results are breathtaking, a time capsule forever. These portfolios will be cherished for a very long time to come. 

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