Thought Pieces

Philipp James Hoffmann: DROMOS marks the first solo exhibition in the United States by New York–based artist Philipp James Hoffmann, presented at D. D. D. D. The exhibition centers on the volatile worlds of Motocross and Freestyle Motocross—sports defined by velocity, risk, and spectacle. Rather than documenting these events in a conventional manner, Hoffmann approaches them obliquely, treating competition footage as raw material for a layered and rigorous photographic process. Working from moving images of MX and FMX competitions, Hoffmann projects selected sequences onto surfaces, isolating fleeting instants from the ongoing rush of action. He then photographs these projections, repeating the cycle of projection and re-photography multiple times. With each iteration, the image drifts further from its origin. Contours dissolve, colors fracture, and the riders’ bodies stretch into luminous apparitions. What began as documentation becomes something far less stable—an arena where time buckles and momentum leaves visible scars. The resulting works carry the residue of their making. Blurs, ruptures, and chromatic distortions are not mere aesthetic effects but traces of attrition. In this sense, the photographs embody the very conditions of Motocross: abrasion, impact, and exposure to danger. Hoffmann’s images echo the dynamism once championed by early twentieth-century Futurism, yet they avoid simple homage. Instead, they present a contemporary meditation on acceleration—on how technology compresses space and stretches perception to its limits. Born in 1992 and based in New York City, Hoffmann draws from cultural theory, myth, and art history to inform his practice. His interest in time-space compression and optical instability positions photography as a site of transformation rather than record. In DROMOS, violence and lyricism intertwine; the grit of the racetrack meets a strange, almost devotional luminosity. The riders remain present, suspended between heroism and erasure, as if emerging from and dissolving back into the very speed that defines them. Image: Philipp James Hoffmann | BELLEROPHON, 2026 © Philipp James Hoffmann

Art as Consciousness, on view at Thomas Erben Gallery from January 15 to February 21, 2026, brings together a group of artists whose practices engage with perception, awareness, and the unseen structures that shape reality. Featuring works by Anna and Bernhard Blume, Eli Bornowsky, Mike Cloud, Róza El-Hassan, Barry Gerson, Harriet Korman, Mehran Mohajer, Dona Nelson, and Adrian Piper, the exhibition reflects a growing cultural turn toward spirituality and alternate modes of understanding in response to the limitations of materialist worldviews. For centuries, Western thought has been organized around the assumption that matter precedes mind. Recent scientific and philosophical inquiries have unsettled this hierarchy, suggesting instead that consciousness may be fundamental rather than incidental. Within this framework, reality is no longer fixed or singular, but fluid, relational, and continuously unfolding. The works in Art as Consciousness resonate with this shift, proposing art as a means of accessing states of awareness that exist beyond empirical measurement or linear logic. Across a wide range of materials and approaches, the artists in the exhibition explore how meaning arises through sensation, memory, and intuition. Some works gesture toward altered states or ritualized processes, while others investigate repetition, fragmentation, and abstraction as pathways into deeper forms of attention. Rather than offering definitive statements, these works remain open-ended, inviting viewers to engage with ambiguity and to recognize perception itself as an active, creative force. Form and matter function not as endpoints, but as conduits through which inner experience becomes momentarily visible. Rooted in Thomas Erben Gallery’s long-standing interest in the intangible dimensions of art, Art as Consciousness proposes that artistic practice can act as a bridge between the material and the immaterial. Here, art is not merely an object to be observed, but an encounter—one that encourages reflection on the nature of existence, individuality, and interconnectedness. The exhibition ultimately frames consciousness not as a private phenomenon, but as a shared field in which creativity, perception, and meaning continuously evolve. Image: Adrian Piper. Food for the Spirit (Image no.1), 1971 B/W silver gelatin print 14.5 × 15in. © Adrian Piper

Candela Books + Gallery presents Claire A. Warden: Mimesis, an exhibition that uses abstraction as a lens through which questions of identity, perception, and representation are quietly but insistently examined. Installed in the gallery’s back space, Warden’s large-scale monochromatic works resist immediate recognition, asking viewers to linger in uncertainty and reconsider the impulse to define what is seen. Rather than offering clarity, the images open a contemplative space where looking becomes an active, reflective act tied to lived experience. Working with alternative photographic processes, Warden physically intervenes in the creation of her images, manipulating silver halides directly on the negative. This deliberate disruption of the photographic surface becomes a metaphor for the layered forces—cultural, biological, historical—that shape identity. The resulting abstractions evoke visual languages borrowed from scientific imagery: cellular structures, topographic formations, and celestial fields. These references suggest systems of classification and observation, while simultaneously revealing their limitations when applied to something as fluid and complex as the self. Mimesis positions photography not as a tool for description, but as a site of negotiation between visibility and erasure. The works hover between portraiture and landscape, presence and absence, reflecting how racialized identities are often read through fragmented or inadequate frameworks. By obscuring literal representation, Warden foregrounds the emotional and psychological dimensions of perception, challenging the viewer to confront how meaning is projected rather than discovered. The exhibition extends into an adjacent room with a projected video work that deepens this exploration of time, movement, and embodied experience. Here, stillness gives way to rhythm and duration, reinforcing the idea that identity is not static but continually in flux. The moving image echoes the tactile qualities of Warden’s photographic practice, emphasizing process as an essential component of understanding. Rooted in sustained research and experimentation, Mimesis reflects Warden’s broader interdisciplinary practice, which engages language, materiality, and representation with quiet rigor. The exhibition invites viewers to sit with ambiguity, acknowledging that identity cannot be fully captured or translated. Instead, it emerges through layered impressions, partial readings, and moments of recognition that remain open, unresolved, and deeply human. Image: Emphasis, 2015. Pigment print (piezo), 36 x 58 inches, 40 x 62 inches © Claire A. Warden

Eccentric Nights brings together a striking body of work created by Ethan Aaro Jones during a summer spent just south of the Arctic Circle, where the sun hovered above the horizon for more than nine consecutive days. Immersed in this extraordinary cycle of continuous daylight, Jones turned his attention to the shifting bands of blazing orange light that moved across his bedroom walls at night. The experience unsettled familiar rhythms, prompting him to reconsider the very notion of nightfall and how much of daily life depends on darkness that, in this place, simply never arrived. Jones describes the constant light as both beautiful and disorienting, a reminder that natural forces follow their own logic regardless of human expectations. By day, when the sun burned bright white, he explored a built environment shaped by the ways people mold landscapes to suit their desires. By night—or what passed for night—he watched the light drift and pulse across his walls, wondering whether these domestic apparitions or the altered land outside felt more unnatural. The photographs in the exhibition arise from this tension, tracing the thin boundaries between what is made, what is observed, and what is felt when place refuses to behave as expected. The project is deeply rooted in Jones’s ongoing interest in how landscapes reveal human intention. Based in Minneapolis, he has long used photography to understand how people inhabit and reshape their surroundings. His work has appeared in exhibitions at institutions such as the Minnesota Museum of American Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and he has participated in residencies from Iceland to Norway. In 2025, he co-founded Nocturno Books with Brad Zellar, further extending his engagement with photographic storytelling. Eccentric Nights invites viewers into an environment where light becomes both subject and catalyst, asking us to reconsider what it means to know a place when its most basic rhythms slip out of sync with expectation. Image: © Ethan Aaro Jones

Beyond the Frame | Personal Projects by Veterans invites visitors to encounter photography shaped not only by artistic vision but by lived experience, service, and personal transformation. Presented at the David & Laura Merage Foundation Gallery, the exhibition brings together new work created by eight Colorado artists who have served in the U.S. military, each developing a deeply personal project over six months of advanced study. Their images reflect stories honed through discipline, curiosity, and an extended commitment to looking inward—beyond memory, beyond service, and beyond the single frame. These projects mark the culmination of CPAC’s Veterans Workshop Series, an initiative launched in 2017 to offer Veterans meaningful access to professional photographic education at no cost. Now in its ninth year, the program has supported 76 participants, nurturing a space where creativity becomes a way to reclaim narrative, build community, and discover new forms of expression. Alongside the new cohort, the exhibition features works by sixteen alumni who continue to refine their practices professionally, demonstrating the lasting impact of this sustained mentorship. Their presence underscores the long arc of artistic growth—how a single workshop can blossom into a lifetime of visual exploration. Each participating artist has pursued a subject that resonates personally. Jennifer Adair turns her lens toward women’s motorcycle groups, capturing the ways camaraderie and empowerment manifest on the open road. Harold Robert looks to his Scottish heritage, weaving portraiture and landscape into a meditation on identity and lineage. Others explore family histories, recovery, or the quiet rhythms of everyday life. Together, their works form a richly varied portrait of contemporary Veteran artists. Year after year, the exhibition reveals how these photographers expand their voices, deepen their craft, and continue to grow—both as artists and as storytellers. Image: © Jennifer Adair

A Tender Excavation offers a reflective encounter with artists who turn to photographic archives as starting points for reimagining the past. Their approaches vary, yet each one sifts through personal, familial, or historical materials to bring overlooked stories into view. By revisiting inherited images and memories, the exhibition invites a renewed understanding of how history can be reassembled with care, allowing new meanings to emerge from fragments that might otherwise remain unseen. The title draws inspiration from Arlene Mejorado’s approach, described as an act of care that uncovers objects, anecdotes, and memories with deliberate sensitivity. This sense of attentive discovery shapes the entire exhibition. Rather than accepting the limits of official histories, the artists build alternative paths, revealing voices and experiences long pushed aside. Their work underscores how archives, even in their silences, contain the seeds of transformation when handled with intention and imagination. The exhibition highlights creators whose identities have often been omitted from mainstream artistic narratives. Many of the artists have ties to communities shaped by migration, displacement, or cultural erasure. For them, engaging with archives becomes a way to reconnect with what has been lost or hidden, offering both a personal and collective act of healing. By reshaping found materials through collage, installation, film, painting, or mixed media, they demonstrate how the past can be both a weight and a resource for envisioning new futures. Through these reinterpreted histories, the exhibition suggests that the act of reconstructing memory is inherently generative. Each work contributes to a broader conversation about belonging and identity, reminding viewers that the story of a place or a people is never fixed. Instead, it continues to evolve through the hands of those who seek to understand and redefine it. Image: Ann Le, What we lost in the Ocean, 2022 (video still). Courtesy of the artist.

The upcoming exhibition Susan Burnstine, on view from January 17 to February 21, 2026, offers a rare opportunity to explore the work of an artist whose vision stands apart in contemporary photography. Originally from Chicago and now based in Los Angeles, Burnstine has built an international reputation for images that seem to rise directly from the realm of memory and dreams. Her photographs, celebrated in galleries worldwide, have been featured extensively in publications, and her long-running writings for photography magazines have earned her a respected voice within the medium. Her acclaimed monograph Within Shadows marked a defining moment in her career, earning major recognition and solidifying her status as a leading figure in fine art photography. Burnstine’s distinctive approach is rooted in an uncompromising commitment to creating all of her effects in-camera. To accomplish this, she constructed twenty-one handmade film cameras and lenses from plastic, vintage components, and everyday objects. Their temperamental, imperfect nature allows her to surrender fully to instinct, embracing uncertainty as a creative force. This process echoes the very themes she pursues: the fragile borders between consciousness and the dream world, clarity and mystery, memory and imagination. In this exhibition, viewers will discover Iar Connacht, a series inspired by the storied landscapes of western Ireland. The region’s Gaelic name evokes a deep sense of history, and Burnstine’s images channel that ancestral atmosphere with remarkable sensitivity. Mist-draped horizons, shadowed mountains, and reflective waters appear as if suspended outside of time, offering glimpses into a land where legend and reality intertwine. With Iar Connacht, Burnstine creates a visual meditation on place, memory, and the unseen forces that shape experience. The series invites viewers to step into an ethereal world that feels both ancient and intimate, a space where the past lingers gently in every shifting veil of light. Image: Beyond the Quiet Man Bridge — Susan Burnstine Archival pigment ink print, varnished © Susan Burnstine

The Last Dyes presents a rare and resonant moment in the history of photography, marking the final chapter of William Eggleston’s pioneering engagement with the dye-transfer process. Shown at David Zwirner’s New York gallery, this exhibition brings together a carefully selected group of images that embody Eggleston’s lifelong pursuit of color as a structural and emotional force. These works are not simply photographs; they are the culmination of an analog practice that shaped the language of color photography itself. Eggleston’s embrace of dye-transfer printing in the early 1970s allowed him to achieve a depth of color and tonal precision previously unseen in art photography. Developed originally for commercial use, the process demanded exceptional technical skill and patience, transforming each image into a meticulously crafted object. With Kodak’s discontinuation of the materials decades ago, these prints stand as the last expressions of a medium inseparable from Eggleston’s vision, produced in close collaboration with master printers who shared his devotion to craft. The photographs span some of Eggleston’s most influential bodies of work, capturing the American South with an intensity that elevates the ordinary into the iconic. Expansive skies, weathered buildings, parked cars, and quiet interiors become stages for color to assert itself as subject rather than ornament. Figures appear less as portraits than as compositional elements, embedded within fields of saturated reds, greens, and blues that pulse with life and memory. Equally compelling are the interior scenes, where light emerges from deep shadow with a near-sacred intensity. These images reveal Eggleston’s sensitivity to atmosphere and form, transforming intimate, unremarkable spaces into meditations on presence and perception. Across landscapes and interiors alike, the photographs achieve a balance between formal rigor and lived experience. The Last Dyes is both an ending and a reaffirmation. It honors an artist-medium partnership that forever altered photographic history, while reminding viewers that these images, though rooted in a specific time and process, remain vibrantly alive. Through color, light, and unwavering attention, Eggleston’s vision endures. Image: William Eggleston, Untitled, 1970 © Eggleston Artistic Trust. Courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner

Art therapy has long offered a meaningful bridge between inner life and outward expression, inviting individuals to explore emotions through the steady, reassuring structure of creative work. Rather than emphasizing technical skill, its practice centers on the experience itself—shaping images that gently reveal memories, fears, hopes, or unspoken thoughts. In this setting, the act of making becomes a form of dialogue, one that supports insight and healing for people of all ages and backgrounds. Within this tradition, photo art therapy holds a special place. Using photographs taken, gathered, or reimagined, participants engage with personal narratives in a tangible way. An image can steady difficult feelings or open paths to stories that resist verbal expression. Through this process, photography becomes both mirror and guide, helping individuals observe their own journeys with clarity and compassion. This exhibition brings together the collective efforts of students, faculty, and alumni from the Nazareth University Graduate Art Therapy Program. Their works reflect the program’s long-standing dedication to thoughtful practice and careful study. To protect privacy, no client work is presented; instead, each piece on display includes a note from its maker, offering insight into how such imagery might function within a therapeutic session. The intention is to help visitors understand not only the artwork, but also the deeper emotional landscapes art therapy seeks to illuminate. Established in the early 1990s, the Nazareth University Graduate Art Therapy Program has remained committed to preparing future therapists through rigorous academic training and hands-on experience. Its Creative Art Therapy Clinic, housed within the York Wellness and Rehabilitation Institute, serves thousands each year and provides graduate students with a vital setting to apply their learning. Under the guidance of licensed and board-certified professionals, students practice with care, patience, and respect, honoring each client’s story as they move through their own healing process. Image: Emma Annable, Untitled, from the exhibition Photo Art Therapy: A Convergence of Creativity and the Healing Process. Photo transfer on wood. Courtesy of the artist. © Emma Annable

Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind is one of the most extensive retrospectives ever devoted to Yoko Ono—an artist, musician, and activist whose influence has reshaped the boundaries of art and thought for over seven decades. Presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the exhibition offers a singular opportunity for American audiences to experience Ono’s creative universe, where poetry, humor, and philosophy intertwine with a lifelong call for peace. Tracing her extraordinary journey from the 1950s to today, the exhibition brings together more than 200 works across performance, film, photography, sound, installation, and archival materials. Central to Ono’s practice are her participatory pieces—artworks that invite the viewer to complete the work through imagination or direct engagement. Visitors are encouraged to take part in these interactive experiences, reflecting the artist’s belief that art can be both a private meditation and a collective act. From her early years in New York’s avant-garde scene, where she became a leading figure in conceptual art and the Fluxus movement, Ono developed an innovative artistic language grounded in instructions and actions. Music of the Mind revisits landmark works such as Cut Piece (1964), her provocative performance exploring vulnerability and trust; Film No. 4 (Bottoms) (1966–67), conceived as a “petition for peace”; and her lyrical films Fly (1970–71). Collaborations with John Cage, Ornette Coleman, and John Lennon reveal her role as a bridge between art and music. The exhibition also highlights ongoing works such as Wish Tree (1996–present), inviting visitors to share hopes for peace, and installations like My Mommy is Beautiful (2004), which encourages reflections on memory and love. Together, these works reveal Ono’s enduring commitment to the transformative power of participation. Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind is a celebration of imagination as an act of resistance and a timeless invitation to envision a more peaceful world. Image: Yoko Ono with Glass Hammer, 1967, from Half-A-Wind Show, Lisson Gallery, London. © Yoko Ono. Photo by and © Clay Perry.

French photographer and visual artist Nicolas Floc’h’s Fleuves-Océan project traces the movement of water across our planet, exploring its flow through varied habitats and representing the ways we are all connected by water cycles and systems. This exhibition pairs vibrant monochromatic photographs of the color of water made under the surface with dramatic black-and-white landscape photographs made along the banks of the Mississippi and its tributaries—from Louisiana and across the country. Nicolas Floc’h documented the entire span of the Mississippi during a 2022 artist residency in the United States with Villa Albertine in collaboration with the Camargo Foundation and Artconnexion. This exhibition, organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art, is a clarion call illustrating illustrating the importance of a network of water that links people across the entire continent. Floc’h’s photography translates important scientific concerns—like climate change and the looming water crisis—into an overwhelming aesthetic experience, without sacrificing any urgency or insistence. A monumental arrangement of Floc’h’s “water color” photographs constitutes a central element of the exhibition. Floc’h made each image by lowering the camera underwater to the same prescribed depths, repeating the process at different locations in the Mississippi and its source waters. Light passing through the water appears as an unbelievable range of colors and shades, influenced by factors like plant and animal life, mineral run-off, and other determinants of the river’s chemical content. NOMA’s presentation combines nearly 300 individual photographs into a monumental grid of vibrant color, a new kind of polychromatic map plotting the health of the Mississippi between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. In tandem with this wall of color, the exhibition includes compelling landscape photographs that illustrate the full span of the watershed, from Minnesota and the Dakotas, through Illinois, West Virginia, Missouri, Texas, and more. Floc’h traces the movement of water through the many tributaries that combine to make the Mississippi, chronicles human efforts to harness and direct the power of the river, and the alarming absence from dry reservoirs and creek beds. Floch’s striking landscapes are presented in tandem with water color photographs specific to that place, making a visual connection between what we can see happening on the land and the quality of the water that surrounds us. Image: The Color of Water, Mississippi River, Ohio River Confluence 2022

Pao Houa Her’s photographic practice delves into the intertwined histories and possibilities of landscape and portrait traditions, exploring how desire, memory, and displacement shape the idea of homeland. Her work draws deeply from the Hmong community’s lived experiences and oral histories, positioning women as the primary transmitters of cultural knowledge and continuity. Through her carefully composed images, Her examines how belonging and identity are constructed, using photography to navigate the layered relationship between place, imagination, and inherited memory. Pao Houa Her: The Imaginative Landscape spans more than two decades of the artist’s career, offering a fluid and unconventional survey of her evolving vision. Seen through the lens of the titular series, the exhibition weaves together connections between earlier projects, recent works, and pieces still in progress. Her photographs move seamlessly between geographies—California’s agricultural valleys, the dense jungles of Laos, and the poppy fields of Minnesota—each location transformed into a symbolic terrain that reflects both personal and collective narratives of migration and resilience. In San José, Her’s images extend beyond the museum walls, appearing throughout the downtown area in both outdoor and indoor settings, on walls and digital screens. This spatial dispersion echoes the resilience and adaptability of diasporic communities, suggesting that cultural identity is not confined to one place but continually reimagined across shifting landscapes. Her’s approach to photography—both grounded and poetic—invites viewers to reconsider how homeland can be simultaneously real and imagined, distant yet intimate. Co-organized by Lauren Schell Dickens of the San José Museum of Art and Jodi Throckmorton of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, this dual presentation embodies the spirit of collaboration and continuity that defines Her’s practice and the enduring vitality of the stories she brings to light. Image: Pao Houa Her, untitled (Erik laying outside with ziplock bags) from “The Imaginative Landscape” series, 2018. Archival pigment print, 32 x 40 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Bockley Gallery.