dust to dust

September 21st to November 19th, 2023

© Christine Elfman

Utilizing alternative photographic processes, dust to dust examines the substance of our being from the big bang theory and dust particles, to the nature of light on our real and imagined landscapes. Creation myths idealize our origins, the elusiveness of memory reshapes the understanding of our histories, and our illusion of continuity negates our ever changing existence – in dust to dust, the Houston Center for Photography examines different takes on interwoven subject matters with four dynamic artists all using experimental photographic processes as components of their practice.


Opening Reception
Thursday, September 21, 6pm – 8pm

Artist Panel for dust to dust w/ Artists Christine Elfman, Granville Carroll, Jonas Yip, and Adrienne Simmons
Friday, September 22, 6pm – 8pm


Christine Elfman

All Solid Shapes Dissolve in Light

© Christine Elfman

All Solid Shapes Dissolve in Light addresses the lack of permanence in the very objects that we’ve determined to be steadfast. “They say that rocks never die, they just change form. What if it were true of everything, including us and pictures? The change happens slowly, so we only notice it in hindsight, like the subtle shift of our faces over time, the photographs reveal so clearly.” With her camera, Elfman holds still the evolution that time insists upon by pairing images of hands and stones. Our flesh reveals our age–marking the passage of time; stone on the other hand appears timeless and equally ancient from the perspective of the very brief moment any one of us spends on this planet by comparison. This calls into question both earth's and our own ephemerality. She uses the anthotype to further suggest our elusiveness and inevitable “fading away.”

Granville Carroll

Cosmotypes

© Granville Carroll

Cosmotypes...create(s) a meeting place where chaos connects to order and light is birth from the void of blackness.” By utilizing the collodion photographic process, Carroll imagines the origin (and conclusion) story of our world; creating stars, planets, and the cosmos out of light playing off the dark inky surface of the collodion plates. “My existence enables me to form new universes and thus, I reclaim the void of nothingness as a space of creation, a space of origin, and a space of power.” Carroll makes solid the very thing we cannot know. 

Adrienne Simmons

slacken + swell

© Adrienne Simmons

slacken + swell a site specific installation of cyanotypes, photo chemical crystals, and found objects–presents a fabricated urban landscape through detritus; literally and figuratively framing the artifacts found while on urban walks and communing with the pathways that present city dwellers with a manicured natural reprieve. ”Buffalo Bayou is roughly 18000 years old, a sleepy river of water that quietly supports diverse ecosystems, often going unnoticed until the wind shepherds in the next big storm. Over the past 100 years, history shows how the bayou has been shaped, molded, enforced, contained, and framed into a body of water that now serves our economic interests more than our natural ones.

Jonas Yip

Shan Shui

© Jonas Yip

Shan Shui manifests on instant film the artist's expression of an inner landscape reminiscent of the Chinese Shan Shui landscape paintings; later scanning and digitally reproducing these tiny made up vistas. The resulting enlarged images are not representations of the mountains and clouds as we see them, but perhaps as the artist idealizes them. “The photo-sensitive chemicals in instant film, exposed to ambient light then hand-extruded, are manually worked in stages over time, capturing movement and gesture, recording evidence of the artist’s hand, ultimately finding expression in the collision of light, chemicals, film and physical manipulation.



Christine Elfman was born in Pennsylvania and lives in Ithaca, NY.  She earned her MFA from California College of the Arts, and BFA from Cornell University.  Her work has been exhibited at the Penumbra Foundation in New York; Oigall Projects in Fitzroy, Australia; Herbert F. Johnson Museum in Ithaca, NY; Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY; TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image and University of the Arts in Philadelphia.  Her photographs have appeared in publications such as BOMB Magazine, 1000words, The San Francisco Chronicle, Photograph Magazine, and Der Greif.  She is represented by EUQINOM Gallery in San Francisco and is Assistant Professor of Studio Art and Book Arts at Wells College in Aurora, NY.

About the Artist, Christine Elfman

About Granville Carroll

Granville Carroll is a visual artist and Afrofuturist using photography and poetry to explore representation and identity. Carroll’s work also explores the multidimensionality of blackness through spatial blackness, temporal blackness, and spiritual blackness. At the core of his practice is the investigation into metaphysics, specifically the ontology of self and the universe. Carroll’s work highlights the imaginative qualities of the mind through storytelling and world building to create new speculative futures and states of being.

Adrienne Simmons is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Houston, TX. She explores ideas of cartography with found materials to address themes of loneliness, loss of place, and memory, and its parallels with the landscapes of her past. Drawn to real and imagined landscapes, she uses abstract imagery in an attempt to understand how memories are embedded into spaces and places. She has shown in galleries, museums, and art fairs around the Houston area while pursuing her MFA at the University of Houston (2024).

About Adrienne Simmons

About Jonas Yip

Jonas Yip is a photographic artist based in Los Angeles. Born to a poet-writer-professor father and an art historian mother, he was raised in a creative environment steeped in art, music, design, architecture, and plenty of travel. Jonas has published two books, Somewhere Between (2017) and Paris: Dialogues and Meditations (2008), in collaboration with renowned poet and scholar Wai-lim Yip. A related exhibition, Paris: Dialogue, traveled through Asia and was also shown at the San Diego Museum of Art. Jonas’s work is in the permanent collections of the San Diego Museum of Art, the National Museum of Chinese Literature in Beijing, and the California Museum of Photography in Riverside, CA, as well as numerous private collections. 


Questions?

For questions about this exhibition, please contact André Ramos-Woodard,

Exhibitions and Programs Coordinator, at andre@hcponline.org or 713-529-4755, ext 16.