Light Work Podcast Light Work

In 1987, Sophia Chai immigrated to New York City from South Korea as a teenager without knowing English. Looking back, she has described that experience as feeling untethered to any internal compass that she could use to navigate her place in a new country with a new language. She visually explains these experiences to us by reinterpreting the Korean language’s characters in photographs that enable us to see the contradictions of visual and verbal communication.
Chai uses optics (focal length, perspective, perception, and magnification) to pin down the marks, rubbings, and paintings on her studio walls. The overall effect is a collage of ideas, with an efficient yet complicated economy of picture making with intentional gaps. These gaps can describe the moment right before the sound of a word comes out of the interior space of the mouth.
sophiachai.com
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The Sun Echoed Like A Song is an exhibition of photographs made in Eduardo L Rivera’s childhood hometown near the Arizona/Mexico border. Taking inspiration from light and heat, he has been exploring the personal histories of family, community, and environment throughout the last decade.
eduardolrivera.com
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In Shunyo Raja (Kings of a Bereft Land), Arko Datto’s epic three-part series chronicles the lives of those living in the world’s largest delta, variously known as the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Meghna Delta. Climate change has rapidly put this immense region and its inhabitants in danger. Even as the artist summarizes the complexity and scale of the challenges confronting both, he knows his time with this landscape is fleeting.
arkodatto.com
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Light Work
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Jenny Calivas' images breathe in photography’s liminal space between intuition and what words can only sometimes convey. Here is a photographer whose practice is consistently curious and rigorous. Her images can unexpectedly taunt us, at once generous and withholding, still and active. In so doing, Calivas wrestles and succeeds with a multitude of ideas—from the spiritual to the feminist to the ecological—and elicits moods that range from the humorous to the existential.
jennifercalivas.com
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Intro/Outro Music: Vela Vela by Blue Dot Sessions
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Guanyu Xu’s Suspended Status depicts an artist caught in a web of red tape. The work on view for this exhibition comprises images from his ongoing series, Resident Aliens, as well as a large grid of images that he calls Suspension. Both bodies of work use visa status in the United States as a means of framing images that depict people who are suspended between countries and cultures. Their futures hang on faceless state agencies in a churning political current. Xu's major influences are the production of ideology in American visual culture and a conservative familial upbringing in China. Xu’s practice examines the production of power in photography as well as the fate of personal freedom and its relationship to political regimes. He negotiates these questions from his perspective as a Chinese gay man. He makes use of photography, new media, and installation, and his work across media intentionally reflects aspects of his displaced and fractured identity.
xuguanyu.com
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Music: "Agree to Disagree" by Zero V
Intro/Outro Music: Vela Vela by Blue Dot Sessions
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Light Work
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Samantha Box’s new body of work, Caribbean Dreams, is a series of complex studio still lifes of personal, familial, and regionally-referenced objects, heirlooms, fruits, vegetables, and plants, onto which she collages family and vernacular images, fruit stickers, packaging, and receipts. A departure from earlier methods and subject matter, the constructed, experimental, and unpredictable compositions of Caribbean Dreams embody Box’s exploration of multiple diasporic Caribbean histories and identities.
Box’s new methods pose an opportunity and dilemma: once you seize the freedom to create an image from scratch, where do you begin? With a new camera, family artifacts, and grocery store produce, she embarked on making tabletop still lifes. She cites seeing a forgotten fruit from her childhood, the soursop, in her local green market as what started her down the path of creating images in the studio. Present in all of Box’s constructions is her desire to see her Caribbean identity and history from as many angles as possible. Each new generation of images both invites and prods the viewer to consider the recurring objects with a fresh perspective.
samanthabox.com
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Music: "Skip Song" by A. A. Aalto
Intro/Outro Music: Vela Vela by Blue Dot Sessions
Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media
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Light Work
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