Artist Statement

When I was 15, I left my friends and family in Sikkim to study in the United States. As I grew into adulthood away from home, I also gradually began to experience an untethering from my cultural roots and the notable absence of something intangible when I did return. My photography series Fogbound is a series of photographs which were created as a meditative exercise, illuminating my morphing spiritual connection to Sikkim upon returning home six years after my departure as a teenager. The project was initially conceived of as a photo essay, for which I was awarded the Steinbrecher Fellowship. I had begun to reflect on my departure from home, responding in writing to some photographs I had already made, but quickly came to realize that the two could not be married. Instead, the visual language that emerged from the exposure of celluloid took center stage in uniquely being able to convey what I was truly missing about home.

The photographs became a way to elicit what I could not put into words, prioritizing emotion over understanding. Through Fogbound I have not found a way to reconcile my complicated feelings about memory and the places I call home, but instead to accept it. With this series, I was trying to avoid setting out with a preconceived idea of what to photograph, but instead to let my eye and body guide me through the spaces I was revisiting. I chose to photograph with a black and white film stock to simplify the process of looking, omitting the color of my memories. As I wandered the busy streets and bazaars, I felt myself taken by form, light and textures that quietly echoed my diasporic melancholia. The analog technology was critical to the way I worked as physically handling the film and winding the camera became synonymous with the act of breathing as I meditated transforming each photograph into a sacred document. The delay in being able to see the photographs until I developed them positioned me firmly behind the lens and viewfinder, in a constant state of reckoning with the present over the nostalgic past that I yearned for but no longer existed. I push processed the negatives, which resulted in added contrast, and more pronounced film grain allowing ghosts of that past to be able to creep into the present, like the fog, mist and rain that is characteristic of the season I usually come home. As I worked, my approach grew increasingly abstract, forgoing verisimilitude in favor of distillation.

The photographs are arranged to welcome the viewer into a meditative space for mindful contemplation on the spiritual loss of a homeland. An underlying sense of isolation from the land is created, as indigeneity and belonging are called into question from a diasporic point of view. Subjects are often obscured and abstracted into the landscape reflective of a renewed perspective on the environment altered by adaptations to new cultural norms and a departure from old ones. It’s been over a year since I returned home to make these photographs, but I continue to learn and make meaning from them. This body of work has taught me that although I will never be able to return to the home I left behind, I will make new homes for myself as I grow.

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Artist Biography

Gyani Pradhan Wong Ah Sui is a non-binary, queer Mauritian-Sikkimese filmmaker, photographer, and visual artist whose work delves into the intersections of identity, memory, and belonging. Drawing from their lived experiences as an immigrant navigating the complexities of home, cultural dislocation, and gender identity, their art explores themes of diasporic melancholia, repressed identity, and spiritual reconnection. Through analog photography and experimental fiction film, they create emotionally resonant pieces that reflect the fluidity of both gender and cultural belonging. Their work, which includes the semi-autobiographical film Moving Room and the photography series Fogbound, uses abstraction and surrealism to explore internal emotional landscapes. By prioritizing emotion over understanding, Gyani’s art provides a space for viewers to reflect on their own questions about identity and home. Their artistic practice embraces the in-betweenness of existence, viewing it not only as a state of not belonging, but as a place of freedom and community.

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In the grout between tile cracks, in porcelain of tub walls, and in the crevices of skin is where you will find me.

Hair falls out of my head, caking up the drain. My cells litter the sides of my sink. Mirrors haunt me as every angle is more terrifying than the last.

My nails pick the layers of my skin becoming covered in blood and soaking with obsession. The scars of my forearms create indents so deep that I can feel my bones. My skin is full of embers. Flesh forever on fire.

I spend durations of my day examining myself and reapplying numerous medicated lotions. All in the hope that it will become just a little more manageable, for the pain to subside for a singular moment; allowing relief to seep its way in.

My largest organ is a collection of broken cells; a ruin.

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Installation Shot Containing Flaking

Discarded Comfort

Just Out of Reach

Keratosis Follicularis

Installation Shot Containing Flaking

Discarded Comfort

Just Out of Reach

Artist Bio

Ge Lemieux (they/them) (b. 2003) is a disabled interdisciplinary artist and framer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Their work focuses on making autobiographical self – portraits as a way of examining and understanding themself. Their creative practice explores their chronic genetic skin condition, Keratosis Follicularis, and how living with this condition impacts their identity and gender expression as a non-binary individual. They are passionate about experimental lens based media and installation work as well as researching into the connections between art and medicine over the course of history. They received their undergraduate fine arts degree in Photography from Lesley University. While at Lesley University, they acted as the Director for the student run gallery, Gallery South, from 2022-2025. They have exhibited in the Greater Boston Area, most notably in the Raizes Gallery’s Deconstructing Disability show in 2024.

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Charles River Dam Locks is a work-in-progress handmade accordion book of photographic cyanotype prints that reflects on the passage of time by paying close attention to a small space over a short period of time. The photographs are spaced equally in time, a few seconds apart, showing the reflection of the sun in the polluted waters of the locks. From image to image, the texture of the water appears at first consistent, but on closer inspection, the highlights on the water shapeshift dramatically, and detritus and an oil slick inches outward and across the frame, flowing from the river toward Boston Harbor. On the reverse of each page the same frame is printed in mirror image, but more faintly, as though the print had bled completely through the page, or as though the page itself had the transparency of the murky river water.

The inconsistencies of the paper coating and printing process cause the prints themselves to ripple in and out of sharpness. The blue of the cyanotype process connects the prints to the water they depict. In one direction, the book reads sequentially in time, while held from the other side, the mirror-image frames flow backward in time. The accordion format also allows it to be displayed circularly. Folded, the book is 4.5″x5.5″. Unfolded, the dimensions of the book are currently 4.5″ x 92″. Completed, I hope to make a version that, at full extension, will have a length of approximately 30 feet.

Artist Bio

Jacob Geiger is a Cambridge-based photographer interested in how the camera can reflect and shape how we conceptualize our position within time and the natural world. Jacob was raised in Tennessee, but came to Massachusetts by way of California, where he worked as a software developer after receiving an undergraduate degree in computer science from Yale University. He received a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from MassArt. He is an arts instructor and studio manager at MIT and an adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

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My work investigates the liminal spaces between memory and reality, exploring how we construct and reconstruct our identities through the stories we tell ourselves. Operating under the philosophy of “anecdotal empiricism,” I blend my analytical background in data consulting with deeply personal explorations of family, trauma, and healing. Through photography and mixed-media installations, I examine the fragile and often distorted nature of memory, particularly how we reshape our pasts to align with unfulfilled desires. My recent series integrate physical materials—cardboard cutouts, bandages, medical supplies—with digital interventions like topographic overlays that map emotional terrain onto constructed scenes. These techniques render familiar images as altered landscapes, creating permanent echoes of not just what was seen, but how it was felt and transformed over time. Growing up in a mixed-race household marked by absence, addiction, and emotional volatility, I bring a perspective often underrepresented in visual narratives around family—one that exists in the gray areas between trauma and healing, where memory is blurry and love and harm coexist. My work doesn’t seek to resolve these contradictions but to hold space for their complexity.

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Artist Bio

Corey Dziadzio (b. 1995) is a Boston-based photographer and mixed-media artist. Corey’s artistic practice is intertwined with his professional career in data consulting, where his analytical mindset informs how he engages with patterns, systems, and human behavior. This balance of structure and introspection reflects his self-described approach, “anecdotal empiricism.” A recipient of the 2024 Mass Cultural Council Artist Grant, Corey has exhibited internationally and continues to explore the boundaries of perception and consciousness in his work.

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Already in my doctoral dissertation in cultural anthropology, photography played an important role in my research projects with indigenous peoples in Bolivia and Mexico. Yet, my approach to photography has undergone radical changes; I came to realize how photographs carry an elegiac dimension, embedded in the “thickness” of ordinary life. No longer limiting my work to serving as an appendage of salvage anthropology, I have come to interrogate photography in its representation of violence and assumed transparency. In and through my work I have come to question the transparency of photography by inserting stitches, tape, writing, or painting and therefore situate myself in post-photography debates over what counts as representation and the design of experimental approaches to the limitations of indexicality in photography. 

Read the full statement here On the Migrant Image and the Violence of Photography

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Artist Bio

Laurence Cuelenaere is an immigrant, cultural anthropologist, and artist. Her work examines the affective conditions of the (false)transparency of images. She received her PhD in cultural anthropology from UC Berkeley and MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. She has conducted long term ethnographic research with indigenous populations in both Mexico and Bolivia. 

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