Victoria Sambunaris: Transforming the American Landscape

A new presentation of Mona Kuhn’s Kings Road series arrives in San Francisco with A Love Affair, on view at EUQINOM Gallery from May 28 to June 27, 2026. The exhibition focuses on photographs made at the Schindler House in Los Angeles, a landmark of modernist architecture designed by Rudolph M. Schindler in the 1920s. Known for its open-plan design and integration with the surrounding environment, the house serves as both subject and setting for Kuhn’s recent work. The series combines color photographs with solarized black-and-white prints, a technique that reverses tones and alters contrast. This process gives the images a distinct visual quality, where light and shadow appear intensified and slightly disorienting. Rather than documenting the space in a straightforward way, Kuhn uses these effects to shift attention toward atmosphere and perception. The house becomes less a fixed structure and more a changing environment shaped by light, texture and movement. An important starting point for the project is a letter written by Schindler to an unnamed recipient, discovered by Kuhn during her research. This detail informs the presence of a recurring female figure who appears throughout the series. Moving through interiors and outdoor spaces, she is often partially obscured or blurred, adding a narrative element without fully defining it. Her presence connects the photographs while leaving room for interpretation. Kuhn, born in São Paulo and based in Los Angeles, has long worked with themes related to the body, space and natural light. In this series, those elements extend into a more architectural context. The Schindler House, with its historical and cultural associations, provides a framework for exploring how personal stories can be linked to specific places. The exhibition follows earlier presentations in Europe and Asia and includes works recently acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum. In A Love Affair, Kuhn presents a series that moves between documentation and interpretation, using photographic techniques to reconsider how space and memory are visually experienced. Image: © Mona Kuhn, courtesy of EUQINOM Gallery

Jay Wolke’s Big Boat Little Pond examines how human ambition reshapes the natural world through altered landscapes and improvised structures. On view at Blue Sky Gallery from June 4 to 27, 2026, the exhibition presents photographs that highlight the friction between nature, architecture and industrial development within the built environment. Wolke’s images focus on assemblages that emerge from institutional decisions and adaptive reuse, often leaving behind uneasy visual consequences. The photographs reveal scenes where the natural and the constructed intersect in unexpected ways. Bodies of water, shorelines and open spaces appear modified by construction, infrastructure or temporary interventions. Wolke frames these environments to emphasize their improvised quality, showing how landscapes are continually remade through planning, neglect or necessity. The title itself suggests a mismatch between scale and setting, reinforcing the tension at the core of the work. Wolke, based in Chicago, has built a long-term practice around documenting social and architecturalconditions in the United States and abroad. His earlier monographs include All Around the House, which examined American-Jewish communal life, Along the Divide on the Dan Ryan Expressway, and Architecture of Resignation, focused on the Mezzogiorno region of Italy. His work appears in major museum collections including the Whitney Museum, MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago and SFMOMA. In addition to his photographic practice, Wolke has worked extensively as an educator. He earned degrees from Washington University in St. Louis and the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and taught for many years at Columbia College Chicago, where he served as Chair of the Art and Design Department. His photographs have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Guardian Magazine, Financial Times Magazine, Newsweek and other outlets. Big Boat Little Pond continues Wolke’s interest in how landscapes bear the marks of human intervention. The exhibition presents a body of work that remains observational rather than editorial, allowing the altered environments to speak for themselves through composition, scale and detail. Image: Trent Davis Bailey, Lilly (Picking Apricots), Paonia, Colorado, 2012 © Trent Davis Bailey

Trent Davis Bailey returns to a remote Colorado valley in The North Fork, a project that blends family history with a long-term study of place and community. On view from June 4 to 27, 2026, the exhibition is based on work created over seven years in the Western Slope region, where Bailey went to reconnect with estranged family members and immerse himself in local life. The photographs center on daily routines, food, landscape and relationships within the valley. Bailey’s approach is grounded in observation rather than narration, capturing moments that reflect kinship, memory and the rhythms of rural life. The work does not attempt to explain the region from the outside; instead, it builds a picture from within, shaped by time spent with neighbors and family across seasons and years. Bailey’s practice often explores how landscapes and culture intersect in America, with a focus on community, identity and the archive. In The North Fork, these themes appear through scenes of farming, gathering, and shared meals, as well as the valley’s terrain and light. The images carry a quiet intimacy, suggesting that personal history is tied closely to the physical world and to the people who occupy it. The exhibition follows the publication of Bailey’s first book, The North Fork, released by Trespasser in 2023. His work is held in major collections including the Denver Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and he has received grants from the Magnum Foundation and the Snider Prize among others. He has also taught at institutions such as the University of Colorado Denver and the California College of the Arts. A second book, Son Pictures, scheduled for release in June 2026 by Chose Commune, continues his exploration of memory and family. In The North Fork, Bailey presents a sustained look at a specific place and the people who shape it, offering a record of return, reconciliation and the slow work of rebuilding ties across time. Image: Trent Davis Bailey, Lilly (Picking Apricots), Paonia, Colorado, 2012 © Trent Davis Bailey

For more than five decades, Harry Gamboa Jr. has defied artistic boundaries, merging photography, performance, and literature into a body of work that is as provocative as it is visionary. Fearless in his critique and sharp in his humor, Gamboa’s art emerges from the charged social and political atmosphere of East Los Angeles, where activism and creativity have long intertwined. His voice—irreverent, poetic, and deeply engaged with issues of representation—has consistently pushed against mainstream narratives, carving out space for Chicano identity and cultural resistance in contemporary art. From the 1970s onward, Gamboa has been at the center of several influential artistic collectives, most notably the legendary group Asco (1972–1985), whose performances and conceptual interventions challenged art-world hierarchies and redefined what it meant to make art in the streets. More recently, his ongoing project Troupe Non Grata (2022–present) continues this spirit of collaboration, experimentation, and critique, blending photography, video, and live performance to confront contemporary social realities. The exhibition presents an expansive view of Gamboa’s creative evolution, combining selections from his photographic archives with excerpts from his prose, poetry, and performance scripts. Fragments of his many projects—ephemeral gestures, staged images, and biting texts—come together to reveal an artist who has never ceased questioning the systems of power that shape both art and society. Each work embodies his signature combination of wit, defiance, and philosophical reflection. More than a retrospective, this presentation serves as a celebration of Gamboa’s ongoing inquiry into art’s potential to provoke and transform. His upcoming Robert C. May Photography Lecture in Spring 2026 will offer a rare opportunity to hear directly from an artist who has, for over fifty years, challenged audiences to see, think, and laugh differently. Image: Harry Gamboa Jr., Clique Laughter #2, 2019. Performers: Aarum Alatorre, Lila-Zoe Krauss, Ruth Murillo, Frank Washington, Barbie Gamboa, Orly Perl, and Henry Quiron. Gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 inches. © Harry Gamboa Jr.

Masks & Myths, on view at The Hulett Collection from May 23 through June 27, 2026, presents a selection of photographs by Vienna-based artist Emma Hartvig that explore intimacy, memory, and the shifting identities of women. Blending cinematic atmosphere with emotional immediacy, Hartvig creates images that move between portraiture and allegory, capturing moments that feel both deeply personal and universally resonant. Her subjects — mothers, dancers, swimmers, and children — appear suspended between reality and reverie, inhabiting spaces shaped by tenderness, solitude, and transformation. Working in both luminous color and stark black and white, Hartvig constructs carefully composed photographs that resist conventional representations of femininity. Rather than focusing on spectacle, her work emphasizes emotional presence and self-perception. Bodies are photographed with sensitivity and restraint, becoming vessels for vulnerability, resilience, and introspection. Influenced by cinema, theater, and fine art photography, Hartvig’s visual language balances softness with precision, creating images that feel timeless while remaining rooted in contemporary experience. Born in Sweden in 1990, Hartvig studied photography at the University of the Arts London before living in Berlin, Paris, Copenhagen, and Los Angeles. These experiences continue to shape her artistic perspective, particularly her interest in the intersection between private identity and public image. Now based in Vienna, she develops long-term projects centered on women’s experiences and emotional landscapes. Her photographs have appeared in international publications including AnOther Magazine, Fisheye Magazine, and Die Zeit, while her work has also been featured in photography books dedicated to representations of water, bodies, and contemporary femininity. With Masks & Myths, Hartvig continues her exploration of the female gaze through photographs that blur the boundaries between autobiography, fiction, and myth. The exhibition offers a contemplative meditation on womanhood and the quiet emotional narratives carried within everyday gestures and fleeting moments. Image: Courtesy of the Hulett Collection. A mother at home, 2020 © Emma Hartvig.

At Traywick Contemporary, Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey: This Earthen Door offers a thoughtful dialogue between photography, botany, and literary history. On view from May 2 to June 27, 2026, the exhibition takes as its point of departure the herbarium created by Emily Dickinson during her teenage years—a carefully assembled book of pressed plants containing more than 400 specimens. Preserved today at Harvard’s Houghton Library, the fragile archive remains largely inaccessible in physical form, surviving mainly through digital documentation. Marchand and Sobsey revisit this historical object not as a fixed artifact, but as a living framework for contemporary ecological reflection. The collaboration began more than five years ago, when the artists cultivated plant species from Dickinson’s original herbarium in their own gardens in Quebec and North Carolina. From these living specimens, they recreated pages of the herbarium using anthotype, a nineteenth-century camera-less photographic process that relies on plant pigments and sunlight rather than traditional chemical development. The resulting images are delicate and time-intensive, requiring days or even months of exposure. Their surfaces hold both the physical trace of the plants and the quiet evidence of duration, patience, and care. Rather than simply reproducing Dickinson’s archive, Marchand and Sobsey expand it into what they describe as a twenty-first-century herbarium. Their work places historical botanical observation into conversation with contemporary environmental concerns, asking how preservation changes in a time marked by ecological fragility. For the Berkeley presentation, a collaboration with the Point Reyes National Seashore Association introduces a new California-based work using both native and invasive species, drawing attention to restoration efforts and the complex relationships between landscape, stewardship, and human intervention. The exhibition also reflects the artists’ shared commitment to examining the often-overlooked contributions of women working across science and art. By bringing Dickinson’s botanical practice into the present, they reveal the herbarium not only as a personal study but as an enduring model of observation and connection. At Traywick Contemporary, This Earthen Door becomes a meditation on memory, ecology, and the fragile act of holding knowledge in material form. Image: Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey, Blue Delphinium - Plate 35, 2023 © Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey, courtesy of Traywick Contemporary

At Higher Pictures, Sheila Pinkel: Early Works, 1974–1977 brings to light a formative chapter in the artist’s career, presenting a group of cyanotypes that have remained largely unseen until now. On view from April 22 to June 13, 2026, the exhibition gathers twelve works that trace the origins of Pinkel’s sustained investigation into light, material, and transformation. These early experiments reveal a practice already attuned to the intersection of scientific process and artistic intuition. Central to the exhibition are the Body Cyanotypes, in which Pinkel uses sunlight as both medium and collaborator. Exposed at midday to achieve heightened contrast, the works transform the human figure into something fluid and unstable. Bodies appear suspended, fragmented, and multiplied, as if reshaped by the movement of light itself. The resulting images echo surrealist traditions, yet remain grounded in the physical act of exposure, where time, gesture, and environment leave their imprint on the photographic surface. Pinkel expands this approach through increasingly complex techniques, layering objects, photographic negatives, and textures directly onto treated paper. Using tools such as carbon-arc lamps and vacuum frames, she manipulates light with precision, while also introducing a tactile dimension by pressing materials into the paper before exposure. These interventions leave subtle traces that persist even after development, giving the works an almost archaeological quality. The surface becomes a record not only of what is seen, but of what has passed through it. Among the most striking aspects of the exhibition is Pinkel’s early engagement with computer-generated imagery, an unusual move at the time. Integrating digital forms into her cyanotypes, she creates a dialogue between emerging technologies and traditional photographic processes. The recurring presence of Marilyn Monroe, rendered as a ghostly and fragmented figure, underscores this interplay between cultural memory and technological transformation. Together, these works position Pinkel’s early practice as both experimental and prescient, anticipating ongoing conversations around the boundaries of image-making. Now recognized in major collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou, Sheila Pinkel emerges here as an artist already pushing against the limits of her medium. This exhibition offers a focused yet expansive view of a body of work that continues to resonate across both analog and digital contexts. Image: © Sheila Pinkel, courtesy of Higher Pictures

At the Robert Koch Gallery, Edward Burtynsky: Recent Releases brings renewed attention to a body of work that has quietly shaped the visual language of environmental photography for decades. The exhibition revisits key early images, now presented in a markedly larger format—up to 72 inches wide—finally aligning with the scale the artist originally envisioned but could not technically achieve at the time. The shift in size does more than amplify detail; it alters the physical encounter with landscapes already defined by their monumental character. Printed without borders and issued in tightly controlled editions, these works re-emerge alongside Burtynsky’s more recent photographs, creating a dialogue across time. His images, often taken from elevated vantage points, map the vast imprint of industry on the land—quarries carved into geometric terraces, oil fields stretching toward abstraction, and water systems redirected by human ambition. What distinguishes Burtynsky’s approach is not only the clarity of his compositions but their ambiguity: beauty and devastation coexist within the same frame, resisting simple moral conclusions. This tension has long defined his practice. Since the late 20th century, Burtynsky has documented sites of extraction and production across the globe, from shipbreaking yards in Bangladesh to lithium evaporation ponds in South America. His work circulates widely in major museum collections, reflecting both its aesthetic appeal and its documentary weight. Recent institutional exhibitions, including a large-scale survey in New York, have reaffirmed his role as a key interpreter of the so-called Anthropocene. Yet the exhibition in San Francisco feels less like a retrospective than a recalibration. By returning to earlier images with contemporary production techniques, Edward Burtynsky underscores a persistent idea: that landscapes altered by industry are not static ruins, but evolving terrains. In these photographs, traces of human intervention remain visible, even as nature begins its slow, uncertain process of reclaiming space. Image: Rock of Ages #15, Active Section, E.L. Smith Quarry, Barre, Vermont, USA, 1992 © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy of the Robert Koch Gallery

Kate Steciw: Pictures, presented at OSMOS through June 27, examines the unstable condition of images in an era dominated by digital circulation and visual excess. In her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Steciw continues a practice that has long explored how photographs mutate once detached from authorship, context, and permanence. Drawing from stock imagery, internet fragments, screenshots, and personal archives, the artist constructs layered compositions that hover between photography, painting, collage, and sculpture. Steciw emerged in the late 2000s as part of a generation of artists grappling with the overwhelming acceleration of image production online. Her work frequently addresses the strange afterlife of photographs once they become endlessly reproducible files drifting across screens and platforms. Rather than presenting images as stable documents, she treats them as unstable raw material—cropped, distorted, flattened, and recombined until their original meanings dissolve. The exhibition’s title deliberately references the influential 1977 exhibition Pictures, organized by critic Douglas Crimp at Artists Space in New York. That landmark show introduced artists such as Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, and Jack Goldstein, whose work challenged traditional ideas of originality and representation during the rise of mass media. Steciw revisits those concerns under contemporary digital conditions, where images no longer simply circulate through television or magazines but through infinite online streams shaped by algorithms, compression, and repetition. The new works on view emphasize materiality as much as digital fragmentation. Printed canvases are cut apart and mounted onto wood panels with an economy of gesture that gives the compositions an austere physical presence. Pixelated textures, editing marks, and abrupt visual seams remain visible, preserving traces of the software tools and digital manipulations from which the works emerge. The resulting images appear both familiar and impossible to fully identify, operating as visual echoes of things half-remembered or already lost. Steciw’s restrained approach distinguishes her from earlier traditions of dense collage. Instead of accumulation, she relies on omission and interruption. Her compositions often feel unresolved, suspended between abstraction and recognition. In this tension lies the central force of the exhibition: a meditation on how contemporary perception becomes shaped by images that are simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Now based in upstate New York, Steciw continues to investigate the psychological and physical residue of digital culture, creating works that transform disposable visual debris into objects of prolonged contemplation. Image: Kate Steciw, IMG_0383.HEICXPICT0711.JPG, 2023 © Kate Steciw, courtesy of OSMOS Gallery

An unsettling question anchors Ruby Rumié’s exhibition ¿How are the children? at Nohra Haime Gallery, where childhood emerges not as a sentimental theme but as a measure of collective condition. Borrowed from a Maasai expression that assesses the well-being of a community through its youngest members, the title frames the work as an ethical inquiry rather than a rhetorical gesture. Here, childhood is treated as a site where social fractures, neglect and resilience become visible. The project originates from a fragment: a newspaper clipping recounting the disappearance of children on a distant island. This minimal trace sets the tone for an investigation that resists narrative closure. Instead of reconstructing events, Rumié builds a symbolic journey. Eleven children move through a charged landscape, departing from environments shaped by pressure and instability. Their trajectory leads to Colombia’s Totumo Mud Volcano, a site long associated with both healing and unease. Within this setting, mud operates as both material and metaphor. Thick, enveloping and unstable, it evokes the sensation of sinking while paradoxically allowing the body to float. This suspended state becomes central to the work’s visual language. Covered in mud, the children appear stripped of social markers, their identities reduced to presence and gesture. The surface conceals and reveals at once, interrupting conventional readings of the body without aestheticizing it. The images avoid dramatization. The children gather around the volcano, each holding a red ribbon that connects them to its summit, forming a quiet, collective structure. The volcano itself shifts from a site of threat to one of origin, a shared point from which meaning radiates outward. Rumié’s approach remains deliberately restrained, privileging stillness over spectacle. Rather than offering resolution, the exhibition sustains a sense of tension. It positions the viewer in relation to a question that cannot be dismissed or easily answered. In doing so, ¿How are the children? reframes photography as a space of ethical attention, where looking becomes inseparable from responsibility. Image: Familia 1 (Family), 2025 © Ruby Rumié

Domestic space becomes both stage and subject in Kathryn Rodrigues: Homesick, presented at Perspective Gallery in Chicago. Built over a five-year period, the exhibition draws on performative self-portraiture to examine how identity takes shape within the shifting boundaries of home. Rodrigues, whose early life unfolded across multiple countries, turns her camera toward her present-day environment in the suburbs, where parenting, memory and displacement intersect in quiet, often uneasy ways. The images are carefully constructed yet retain a sense of immediacy. Rodrigues places herself within interior and natural settings, using her own body as a point of tension within the frame. These self-portraits do not seek resolution; instead, they register emotional states that move between fatigue, humor and longing. Scenes of domestic routine—childcare, household tasks, moments of pause—are subtly disrupted, suggesting the friction between expectation and lived experience. Central to the work is a feminist approach to space. By staging herself within environments historically coded as private or gendered, Rodrigues reclaims them as sites of authorship rather than containment. The domestic sphere appears neither wholly comforting nor entirely restrictive, but as a terrain where competing pressures unfold. This ambiguity reflects a broader inquiry into how belonging is constructed, particularly for individuals shaped by mobility and cultural hybridity. Visual motifs recur throughout the series: thresholds, windows, fragments of landscape that echo an elsewhere. These elements introduce a sense of permeability, as if the boundaries between interior and exterior, past and present, remain unsettled. The title Homesick captures this condition, pointing not only to longing for a place, but to the difficulty of defining one. Rodrigues’s work ultimately resists a singular narrative. Instead, it assembles a series of gestures and moments that, taken together, reflect the ongoing effort to establish continuity within a life marked by movement. Image: Anchored Again © Kathryn Rodrigues

Sống, on view from May 29 through June 28, 2026, at the nonprofit organization CENTER in Santa Fe, marks a notable shift in the public understanding of Ocean Vuong’s creative practice. Widely recognized for his acclaimed literary work, Vuong here presents a deeply personal body of photographs that reveals a parallel visual language developed over more than two decades. The exhibition title, drawn from the Vietnamese word for “to live,” signals a meditation on survival, intimacy, and continuity. At the core of the exhibition is an extended photographic series centered on Vuong’s younger brother, created in the years following their mother’s death. These images trace a shared experience of grief and resilience, unfolding through scenes of everyday life. Fluorescent-lit nail salons—echoing the labor that shaped the artist’s upbringing—contrast with quieter domestic interiors, where gestures of care and moments of stillness take on heightened emotional weight. The photographs resist spectacle, instead favoring a restrained, attentive approach that aligns closely with the sensibility of Vuong’s writing. Born in Saigon and raised in the United States within a working-class immigrant family, Vuong often addresses themes of displacement, memory, and identity. These concerns carry through into Sống, where the camera becomes a tool for both witnessing and preserving fragile connections. The images function less as standalone compositions than as fragments of an ongoing narrative, shaped by time and proximity. Presented by CENTER, an organization long dedicated to supporting socially engaged, lens-based work, the exhibition situates Vuong’s photographs within a broader conversation about storytelling across mediums. Known for championing projects that reflect lived experience and cultural complexity, the institution provides an apt context for this intimate body of work. In Sống, photography emerges as an extension of language—another means through which Vuong examines what it means to endure, remember, and ultimately, to live. Image: From the series Sống © Ocean Vuong