Vikesh Kapoor, A Handmade Gift from an Amish Patient,2021
Silver Eye has supported vital new voices in contemporary photography through Fellowship, our annual international juried photography competition, for over twenty years. Taking the Fellowship 24 competitionas a point of departure, this exhibition reflects the unique perspectives of this year's artists. Works in this exhibition speak to the power of devotion in many forms, place as an intersection of personal, social, and political concerns, and visual language as a means to new narratives.
With care and dedication, Rachael Banks has photographed her family in the Knobs and Bluegrass regions of Central Kentucky for over ten years. Her work expresses intertwined cycles of life and loss between nature and familial generations and challenges narrow representations of this region. Vikesh Kapoor expresses his mother's unwavering devotion to her community as an OBGYN through layered approaches to storytelling. Weaving contemporary works with family album photographs and archival material, Vikesh Kapoor reflects upon her legacy within her small town and beyond.
Both William Camargo and Anna Rotty use photography to encourage dialogue on urgent social issues. William Camargo's work examines issues of gentrification in his hometown of Anaheim, California, elevating Chicanx/Latinx histories in this city. In doing so, Camargo responds to canonical Californian photographers who shaped the medium before him. Anna Rotty examines her relationship with water and its shifting social significance by creating unique installations and photographs. Rotty explores this theme in the Northeast and the Southwest, informed by her personal history and concerns around climate change and civic infrastructures.
Collectively, the artists of Fellowship 24 frequently question how photography can be a powerful tool to claim space figuratively and conceptually. This necessitates dismantling art history and photography's presumed authority. Xavier Scott Marshall reimagines centuries of Christian iconography to create large-format black-and-white photographs that center Black experience and change perceptions of religious image-making. Anthony Francis exposes, redirects, and transforms foundational assumptions about photography, such as pose and gesture, to elevate individual agency and create potent spaces for imagination.
Fellowship 24 reflects Silver Eye's mission to support contemporary photography that addresses contemporary artistic and social concerns, often in dialogue with the medium's past. We are grateful to our jurors Zora J Murff, Aline Smithson, and Jeremiah William McCarthy, and to the artists for the opportunity to collaborate to realize their visions.