Please join us for this virtual reception and artist talk with the award winners for the exhibition Words & Pictures.

Juror’s Award: Charles Ingham
Juror’s Honorable Mentions: Lindsay Buchman, Jackson Nichols, Angela Scardigno
Director’s Award: Maryam (Nilou) Ghasempour Siahgaldeh
Director’s Honorable Mentions: Melissa Kreider, Michael Pointer, Dean Terasaki

Charles Ingham

As a conceptual artist, Ingham creates photo-narratives that are hybrid forms, transgressing distinctions between the verbal and the visual. His art represents a combinatory aesthetic; each work constitutes a whole made up of parts, creating something of a symbiosis: the words, the images (abstract and referential), the space between images, the subjects, the reference to specific individuals, places, events, or times. Many visual references are obvious; some of the bones, sinews, and other connective tissue that hold a particular narrative together work within the piece's own logic, a logic that viewers find for themselves. Here, the artist makes the work, and that work has an agenda, but a significant part of that agenda is for the viewer to find something of (or for) themselves within these images and words. With the aspect ratio of each finished work, Ingham wishes to suggest something of a cinematic form; he likes the idea of the viewers' eyes moving initially left to right, reading the visual - verbal narrative. The thin, vertical color strips are cropped details from photographs that he has taken and serve as a form of punctuation within the narrative. The visual texts in these narratives are comprised of his own images but can include a manipulated found image from his collection.

Born in England, Charles Ingham is a photographer living in San Diego.

Maryam (Nilou) Ghasempour Siahgaldeh

Maryam Ghasempour Siahgaldeh explores the emotional ties between physical spaces and their inhabitants through double-exposure photography. Her work is enhanced by adding Iranian calligraphy to deepen the visual narrative. This series seeks to capture how environments retain the memories and emotions of those who have once filled them, emphasizing the profound connection between presence and absence. 

This photograph depicts a visual conversation between the seen and unseen. Layered images of disorganized everyday objects symbolize the persistence of loneliness within a cluttered home, suggesting that solitude can dwell amidst physical clutter. These overlapping exposures illustrate physical intersections and the intertwining of time, memory, and emotional layers.

Incorporating Iranian calligraphy introduces an intimate and culturally specific dimension to the work. This script does not simply represent language; it evokes symbols of personal and collective stories. The calligraphy threads through the visual chaos like echoes of past dialogues, infusing each piece with longing and the poetic tension between love and isolation.

"Echoes of Solitude" encourages viewers to perceive the spaces around them as physical structures and emotional landscapes, echoing the absence of what was once present. This image aims to elicit a reflective response, connecting personal experiences with broader themes and encouraging a deeper contemplation of the

meanings embedded in our surroundings and how they shape our sense of solitude.

Maryam Ghasempour Siahgaldeh is a student from Iran currently studying at Iowa State University.

Lindsay Buchman

’Somewhere else’ is a newspaper broadsheet from the project, SUNSTRUCK, which contains archival photographs and writing triangulating land and seasickness, the horizon line, and the language of distance and desire. Including a 1000-word essay, 49 figures from 1916-2018, and notes on provenance, the project engages the physiological nature of disorientation while calling into question the mutability of time, photography, and sight.

Lindsay Buchman is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and publisher living and working in Hudson, NY.

Melissa Kreider

Kreider's series "i will bite the hand that feeds" is created in response to navigating rage, misogyny, queer womanhood, and questions if capitalism and patriarchy will crush us.  

Processing the time she's spent in jails and courtrooms while producing another body of work, she has had to consider what it means to closely bear witness to systems that actively harm her community under the guise of assistance and justice. "i will bite the hand that feeds" is a manifestation of the dots she's been connecting between her lived experiences as a survivor of assault, those that allow her to photograph them, the concept of “justice” in the united states, punishment, and how pop culture and media handling on topics of assault affects us on a global scale as well as every facet of our lives.

Jackson Nichols

Nichols is a documentary photographer focused primarily on Portuguese culture of California. 

He has attended and documented Portuguese cultural celebrations called Festas for over 30 years. Primarily working with black & white film, Nichols maintains a home darkroom to process his film and prints. For the last 10 years he has also used a DSLR to record portraits and video of events and bloodless bullfights. He filmed and edited a 40 minute documentary on the formation of a new forcado group in California, "Luso Americanos" in 2020, documenting the formation and training of the group culminating in their first bloodless bullfight in Stevinson, CA. 

Nichols appreciates switching back and forth between film and video, experimenting with each medium to match the project at hand.

Michael Pointer

Pointer began with a simple project to make minimalist still-lifes on the grid of a large, ancient paper cutter. He had a nice collection of dead things, dry and needful. Concurrently, he was walking around photographing trees at night. Pointer began to composite the two types of photos. The result was dark and harsh, but he felt that he could enhance the nightly otherworld he played in. During this process there was a worsening political situation. The news became noise to Pointer. Faces began to emerge as he composited and to him they seemed to be precise images of the emotional swirl of American politics. These are what he dug out of his deeper pockets - loose screws, a bad penny, lint, love poems to unfold like a sharp pocket knife.

Angela Scardigno

Places are built by people and their stories. The Rio Grande Valley is a place with much to tell. With this in mind, “Greetings from El Valle,” a collaborative project Scardigno’s work is part of, started with a conversation about local archives, their role in community building, and the power of engaging history through art. These works of collage were made with and in response to archival materials that belong to the Magic Valley collection of the Margaret H. McAllen Memorial Archive at the Museum of South Texas History, along with a selection from the online Library of Congress. Scardigno decided to work with this collection because its graphic richness opens up possibilities for collage-making, as it consists of promotional materials, publications and photography. In turn, collage, a medium capable of revealing multiple levels of information at once, offers us a unique way of learning from these materials. This work invites the community to explore our history inquisitively and expand our sense of belonging through opening a dialogue with the past and each other. 

Angela V. Scardigno graduated as a Graphic Designer from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 2010, she moved to the United States, where she completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Texas. Scardigno has exhibited throughout the Rio Grande Valley, Argentina, and Slovenia. She lives and works in McAllen, Texas.

Dean Terasaki

This picture is from "Veiled Inscriptions," which is a body of work about a collection of letters that fell out of a building's wall as it was being remodeled in Denver, Colorado. Hidden for almost 70 years, the letters were requests mailed by Japanese Americans who were illegally removed from their homes and forced into War Relocation Authority incarceration camps during World War II. The hand-written requests were sent to a Japanese American business that was still functioning during the war. That business, T.K. Pharmacy, was owned and operated by Terasaki’s uncles.

Terasaki is on a journey to photograph all of the incarceration camp sites. He makes photomontages to reunite the T.K. Pharmacy letters with the locations where they were written. His images are about loss, which is a fundamental concept in the immigrant experience and to this narrative in particular. Loss is leaving one's family to come to America. Loss is in the lives that were torn apart by the forced relocation. Loss is the passing of ancestors that refused to speak about the disruption. It is in the farms that have eliminated evidence of the camps and now reap crops from the labor of those once incarcerated there. And young men's lives were lost on distant battlefields as they proved their citizenship for a government that had brutally taken away their rights as citizens. The letters are important not only for what they request - hair dye, skin lotion, stomach remedies, dignity - but as a timely reminder about the fragility of human rights in the face of social disruption.

Terasaki is sansei. In his culture that means his grandparents all immigrated to the United States from Japan.

Letters courtesy of the T.K. Pharmacy Collection, Densho.