Artist to Artist: Light Work’s Fine Print Program

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Rivalry Projects is sharing a new exhibition in collaboration with Light Work (Syracuse, NY) and their renowned Fine Print Program. In this exclusive partnership with Rivalry Projects, Light Work will be offering affordable photographs from leading contemporary artists including Keliy Anderson-Staley, Atong Atem, Doug DuBois, Lucas Foglia, Jason Fulford, Sharon Harper, Shane Lavalette, Wayne Lawrence, Irina Rozovsky, Miki Soejima, Rodrigo Valenzuela, and Vasantha Yogananthan. 

On view in Rivalry’s Project Space from May 13-June 30, 2022, Artist to Artist highlights artwork available through the Fine Print Program and makes collecting photography a very real possibility for everyone. Each artist has donated their pieces in support of Light Work’s mission, and through the generosity of these artists Rivalry Projects and Light Work are able to offer them at affordable prices. 

Artwork will be available to purchase from May 13 onward in-person at Rivalry Projects. You can also find participating artists and available work on our Artsy page. You can find all available works from the catalog of Light Work’s Fine Print Program through their website at www.lightwork.org 

As an added component of this partnership, Rivalry Projects will also offer issues of Contact Sheet, Light Work’s single photographer-focused magazine, which they publish five times per year. Rivalry will also be signing up those interested for Contact Sheet subscriptions. Please note: each subscription directly supports Light Work’s programs, including residencies, exhibitions, and publications. 

Rivalry Projects is a commercial art gallery and arts production space located at 106 College Street in Buffalo’s historic Allentown neighborhood.

Artist and curator Ryan Arthurs founded Rivalry to create an arts space that can function as both a site of exhibition and production of contemporary art. Rivalry exhibits emerging, mid-career, and under-represented artists working in all media.

Light Work is an artist-run, non-profit organization founded in 1973. Its mission is to provide direct support through residencies, publications, exhibitions, a community-access digital lab facility, and other related projects to emerging and under-represented artists working in photography and digital imaging. 

In 1991, Light Work began to offer limited-edition prints and signed books through their subscription program for the first time. This program remains a unique way for artists they’ve supported to give back to the next generation of artists coming through their programs. Over the past twenty-three years, Light Work’s Fine Print Program has included works by many important contemporary artists, including Dawoud Bey, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Mark Steinmetz, Carrie Mae Weems, William Wegman, James Welling, Deborah Willis, and Hank Willis-Thomas.

Light Work Congratulates 2022 Guggenheim Fellows

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Five Light Work Artists-in-Residence among 2022 Guggenheim Fellows

Light Work offers enthusiastic congratulations to current Light Work artist-in-residence Gary Burnley (2022), former residency participants Kelli Connell (2008), Odette England (2021), Nancy Floyd (1998), and former AIR and Kathleen Ellis Gallery exhibiting artist Keliy Anderson-Staley (2010, 2011) for being named 2022 Guggenheim Fellows. The Guggenheim is one of the nation’s most prestigious awards for scholarly and artistic achievement, honoring individuals who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.

In all, this year’s recipients represent fifty-one scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, eighty-one academic institutions, thirty-one states and the District of Columbia, and four Canadian provinces. Many Guggenheim recipients respond directly to issues like climate change, pandemics, Russia, feminism, identity, and racism in their projects. The exceptionally rigorous application and peer review process selects each year’s recipients from almost 2,500 applicants on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise.

  • Gary Burnley, Facing History #15
  • Kelli Connell, Head to Head, 2008-10
  • Nancy Floyd, Untitled, Fire, 2010/2021

“Now that the past two years are hopefully behind all of us, it is a special joy to celebrate the Guggenheim Foundation’s new class of Fellows,” said Edward Hirsch, President of the Guggenheim Foundation and 1985 Fellow in Poetry. “This year marks the Foundation’s 97th annual Fellowship competition. Our long experience tells us what an impact these annual grants will have to change people’s lives. The work supported by the Foundation will aid in our collective effort to better understand the new world we’re in, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going. It is an honor for the Foundation to help the Fellows carry out their visionary work.”

We can proudly offer a signed fine print, photobook, and Contact Sheet volumes that feature works by this year’s Guggenheim recipients. Proceeds benefit and champion Light Work’s ongoing support of emerging and under-represented artists working in photography through residencies, publications, exhibitions, educational programming, and a community-access digital lab facility. Search all our offerings at lightwork.org/shop.

Odette England
2021 Residency / 2021 Photobook Award Recipient

Odette England, Dairy Character
Saint Lucy Books / Light Work
188 pages / First Editon
Signed by the artist

Odette England is an artist and writer who uses photography, performance, writing, and the archive to explore themes of autobiography, land, gender, and ritual. She edited the critically acclaimed book, Keeper of the Hearth: Picturing Roland Barthes’ Unseen Photograph (Schilt, 2020). Public collections holding England’s work include the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, George Eastman Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography, New Mexico Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, and Texas A&M University. In 2021, Radius Books published her collaboration with Jennifer Garza-Cuen, Past Paper // Present Marks: Responding to Rauschenberg. England was an artist-in-residence at Light Work in 2021.

Keliy Anderson-Staley
2010 Residency / 2011 Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery

Keliy Anderson-Staley, Kevin, 2010
Pigmented inkjet print (from a wet-plate collodion tintype), 10 x 8″
Edition of 50, signed and numbered by the artist

[Hyphen] Americans
Contact Sheet 163: Keliy Anderson-Staley
Paperback: 48 pages
Publisher: Light Work (September 1, 2011)

For her series [Hyphen] Americans, Keliy Anderson-Staley created a vast, broadly diverse collection of portraits with the wet-plate collodion process, using nineteenth-century chemical recipes, period brass lenses, and large wooden view cameras. Each individual—identified only by a first name—asserts his or her self, resisting any imposed external categorizing system. At once contemporary and timeless, these portraits raise questions about our place as individuals in history and the role that photographic technologies have played over time in defining identity.

You can find works by and essays about 2022 Guggenheim recipients in Contact Sheet Annuals 102, 152, 162, and 163. Light Work designs and prints Contact Sheet in the tradition of fine art photography monographs and is completely commercial-free. We invite you to see first-hand the innovative and creative work of artists who are making important contributions to the field of photography.

Over Light Work’s nearly fifty year history, thirty-six of our artists-in-residence, photobook award recipients, and exhibiting artists have received the Guggenheim Fellowship. These include Sama Al Shaibi, Dawoud Bey, Doug DuBois, John Gossage, Elijah Gowin, Deana Lawson, Christian Patterson, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Cindy Sherman, Cauleen Smith, Mark Steinmetz, Rodrigo Valenzuela, and Hank Willis Thomas. We are humbled and honored to provide time, space, and resources for so many of these artists early in—and throughout—their careers. We extend our congratulations to all the 2022 Guggenheim recipients on joining this illustrious body of artists and the legacy that represents. 


See the list of new Fellows here.

Review: Carl Mellor on Melissa Catanese’s The Lottery

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This review is written by Carl Mellor, a freelance writer. He covered visual arts for the Syracuse New Times from 1994 to June 2019. Mellor continues to write about exhibits and artists in the Syracuse, New York area.
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The Lottery, Melissa Catanese’s solo exhibit in Light Work’s Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery, gathers together disparate and seemingly unrelated images from archival sources and the artist’s own work. Indeed, the show moves from a gray view of ocean waves to the striking color of poppy fields, from angry molten lava to a placid but ominous iceberg, from oil erupting from a derrick to rows of motor vehicles linked to no one.

Photos of humans also have no obvious connections at first glance. There are images of a man swimming furiously, of two men scaling a huge sand dune, of a crowd in the street celebrating the end of World War II, of a figure kneeling down by a prone individual. Perhaps he’s helping someone who fell from a bike or was injured during a sports event. We don’t know.

And yet, there’s no basis for assuming that the exhibition is focusing on life as random and absurd. Catanese is playing a very different game. She’s created a visual idiom to deal with a time of struggle and anxiety, a period of political strife, and an unprecedented environmental crisis. Global warming and climate change pose myriad threats: potential extinction of species including right whales, flooding of communities ranging from Pacific islands to New York City neighborhoods, and much more.

Catanese, for her part, isn’t erecting signposts listing reasons for alienation. Rather, her show hints, suggests, engages with the question of why so many people feel unhappy and confused. The images work together to influence viewers in a subtle way.

For sure, the show has key images that help develop central themes. Thus, a mushroom cloud speaks to nuclear weapons and the specter of nuclear war, while rocks speckled with gold color refer to radiation.

image: Melissa Catanese, Figure #2

In addition, The Lottery delves into our relationship with nature. Various photos portray an active volcano and lightning strikes, as well as oceans, the primal source of all life on earth. One of the best images depicts a large rock situated on water, framed by shadows.

Elsewhere, two cormorants stand on land, not far from each other. They aren’t near the fish they feed on. And kelp washed ashore makes its own point. Kelp forests underwater trap and store carbon dioxide. It’s estimated that such forests are declining at two percent a year.

Certainly, the show communicates a sense of people struggling with isolation. We see a lone figure mountain climbing and another solitary individual running aimlessly on a rock formation near water. In a third photo, two people embrace, but we barely see their faces.

Yet another direction emerges in a large photo of a crowd packed into an auditorium. Although their faces are visible, few smile, many look as they would prefer to be elsewhere, and there’s a sense of unease and discomfort. This may not be a mob, but it’s painfully close. At the very least, there’s no sense of community.

Beyond that, the photographer took great care in organizing the portfolio of images that appears at Light Work. She mixes black-and-white and color photos, large and small prints, and images from various decades. On one wall, the photos begin at eye level and descend almost to the floor, influencing viewers to look up and down.

Catanese also builds physical energy into the exhibition. In many of the photos, something active is happening. The swimmer and the climber are in motion, a volcano has erupted, oil is propelled into the air.

Melissa Catanese, Sunset #3

Finally, the exhibit’s title relates directly to Shirley Jackson’s classic short story, The Lottery, in which a small community goes through a yearly ritual of selecting an individual and then stoning him or her to death. No one knows when or why the ritual began.

Clearly, Catanese is working in a different medium and living in a society quite different from the United States in the 1940s. However, she, like Jackson, is exploring culture, examining how influences direct and indirect impact our lives. That exploration requires a subtle grouping of images, an ability to play photos off each other, and confidence that viewers will respond to a singular type of exhibit. Catanese is up to the challenge, and the show is well worth extended viewing.

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The Lottery is on display through July 22, 2022, at Light Work, located at 316 Waverly Ave. on the Syracuse University campus. The gallery is open to the public from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays and Thursdays, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday, and from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For more information, call 315-443-1300 or access www.lightwork.org.