The Archive as Liberation Exhibition
2025-05-12 10:00 - 2025-08-29 17:00 (America/New_York) | Light Work, 316 Waverly Ave, Syracuse, NY, 13210, United States
May 12–August 29, 2025
Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery
Reception: Friday, July 25th, 5-7pm
The Archive as Liberation is a publication and exhibition organized by Aaron Turner (Light Work artist–in-residence, 2018, and Light Work exhibiting artist, 2021). Turner has gathered a unique group of artists and writers to engage in dialogue around archival photographic methods. Contributors include Andre Bradley, calista lyon, Raymond Thompson Jr., Harrison D. Walker, and Savannah Wood, alongside writing by Chisato Hughes, Alec Kaus, Andrew Martinez, Aaron Turner, Amelia Wallin, and Wendel A. White, with a foreword by the book’s editor, Donasia Tillery. The publication was designed by Elana Schlenker.
To mark the launch of this publication, Light Work has mounted an exhibition highlighting many of the contributing artists. This exhibition includes work by Andre Bradley, Chisato Hughes, Alec Kaus, calista lyon, Raymond Thompson Jr., Harrison D. Walker, Wendel A. White, and Savannah Wood.
“The artists included in this publication and exhibition are engaged in resilience, ancestral understanding, counter-memory, translation, activism, tension, narrative, and critique. Through their artistic gestures, they illustrate freedom in the Archive.” —Aaron Turner
The exhibition also includes a unique reading room curated by Turner with artists’ books from his personal collection and pieces from Light Work’s collection. The reading room will be in Light Work’s Lab for the duration of the exhibition.

2025 Light Work Grants in Photography Exhibition
2025-05-12 10:00 - 2025-08-29 17:00 | Light Work, 316 Waverly Ave, Syracuse, NY, 13210, United States
May 12–August 29, 2025
Jeffrey J. Hoone Gallery
Reception: Friday, July 25, 5-7pm
With enormous pleasure, we present the 50th Annual Light Work Grants in Photography! The 2025 recipients are Sarah Knobel (St. Lawrence), Joe Librandi-Cowan (Onondaga County), and Lida Suchy (Onondaga County). The two runners-up are Marna Bell (Onondaga County) and Adrian Francis (Onondaga County).
This year’s judge was Marina Chao (a curator at CPW in Kingston, NY), who writes: “From an unexpected approach to plastic waste to portraits of Ukrainian civic leaders to an exploration of home, family, and memory, this year’s grantees address subjects that are intimate and personal, urgent and political, in innovative, collaborative, and deeply felt ways.”
The Light Work Grants are part of our ongoing effort to support and encourage Central New York artists working in photography and related mediums within a fifty-mile radius of Syracuse. Established in 1975, the Light Work Grants are among the oldest photography fellowships in the country.

In Conversation: Courtney Rile
2025-06-26 20:30 - 2025-08-30 23:00 | Everson Museum Auditorium, 401 Harrison St., Syracuse, NY, 13202
Light Work’s Urban Video Project is pleased to present the exhibition In Conversation from June 26 to August 30 at their architectural projection venue on the Everson Museum facade.
In Conversation is new work created by Courtney Rile. This work explores the moving image and our human relationship to technology through the language of the canon of video art.

In Conversation
2025
In the early 1970s, Syracuse was a center of innovation — the Everson Museum hired one of the first curators of video art and hosted seminal media artists from around the world. At the same time, Synapse, an experimental media collective at Syracuse University, provided fertile ground for explorations of this new technology as both art form and revolutionary tool of communication.
In Conversation is a dialogue with the work of Bill Viola, Shigeko Kubota, and Peter Campus, all of whom exhibited at the Everson Museum in the early 70s. Structured in a series of modules that function like musical movements or songs on an album, motifs recur throughout In Conversation: reflections, the distortion of time, video as an extension of self, and video as an observational tool, exploring the individual, intimate experience of video as a way to see ourselves from another perspective or in another time, a step beyond the present tense of the mirror. These explorations, which trace their lineage to the earliest days of video art, are more relevant than ever in today’s world, a world in which audiovisual technologies have become integral to nearly every facet of our lives.
