Rapt in Wonder:
featuring the work of River Claure, Jason DeMarte, Adam Ekberg, Julianna Foster, Xuan-Hui Ng,Thomas Jackson
September 18 - November 9, 2025
© River Claure
Whimsy, delight, and the sublime—companion exhibitions Rapt in Wonder and Surface draw on these emotional and aesthetic threads, bringing together artists who stage reality in order to construct photographic images evocative of our universal capacity for awe. Each body of work provokes a sense of wonder: at times playful and joyous, at others contemplative and profound.-
El impulso de un artista por crear es extraordinario y necesario; como el oxígeno. Así como la pandemia arrebató el aliento de los cuerpos de tantos, también provocó cambios abismales en la manera en que los creativos llevaban a cabo su práctica.
Han pasado cinco años desde que la pandemia global de COVID impactó nuestras vidas. Hecho en Pandemia surge de la prerrogativa del artista de reconsiderar su práctica durante ese tiempo de aislamiento e incertidumbre, además de aprovechar el privilegio paradójico de estar desvinculado de los traslados diarios y de la rutina habitual, y en su lugar, se vio impulsado por otro tipo de monotonía y repetición. Si bien todas las obras en esta exposición nacieron a raíz del COVID y tocan conceptualmente la pandemia, también se trata, en igual medida, de la compulsión del artista por crear aún en los tiempos más extremos; especialmente en los tiempos más extremos. Esta exposición resalta la necesidad inquebrantable de los creativos por compartir su sensibilidad única, invertir en su práctica artística y responder al llamado de sus musas a pesar de (y como respuesta a) la realidad que les rodea.
Artist Panel Conversation
Thursday, September 18, 2025 from 5:30 - 6:15 PM
Opening Reception
Thursday, September 18, 2025 from 6:15 - 8:00 PM




About the Artists:
River Claure, Jason DeMarte, Adam Ekberg, Julianna Foster, Xuan-Hui Ng,Thomas Jackson
River Claure
River Claure
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Jason DeMarte:
My work examines a contemporary consumer existence through sublime tableaus of apathy. I’m interested in creating visually seductive landscapes with narratives of post-capitalist tensions. Through hypothetical dystopias, a rearranging of the natural order emerges from the ashes of our inconspicuous consumption, where nature, much like our commercial environments, has been impregnated with the detritus of marketing, consumption, and waste. Landscapes pop with carefully designed visual gluttony that attempts to compete with our limitless capacity to consume. Animals appear perfectly apathetic in overly adorned false environments, surrendering to the inevitability of what’s to come.
I work photographically to tap into the medium's ability to reflect truth, and much like commercial photography, I see the work as a nonsensical sales pitch, a seduction of false promise, where nature has succumbed to relentless marketing. Using the same methods as commercial photographers, I elevate seemingly ordinary, dull flora and fauna to the commercial stage, where we understand and treat nature like the material world we surround ourselves with. In an age where truth is irrelevant, hyperfocus, artificial lighting, and scale are used to exaggerate facts. My process ultimately aims to embrace a manipulation of truth by hyper-exaggerating the ordinary to mirror the sublime apathy of our modern existence.
My practice draws from a long history of constructed narratives in photography, artists like Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Julia Margret Cameron, were early pioneers in manipulating truth with the medium, while later artists like Gregory Crewdson, Jeff Wall, and Anthony Goicolea made the ordinary surreal with their highly choreographed stills. My process aims to simultaneously embrace a manipulation of truth by hyper-exaggerating the ordinary and to work within a kind of truth by utilizing the inherent believability of the photographic medium.
Like the early tableau photographers, I draw inspiration from painting, specifically naturalist painting from movements like the Hudson River School. I’m interested in rekindling the romantic notions of nature while simultaneously subverting those romantic notions by juxtaposing pop consumption and visual gluttony.
Jason DeMarte is an artist best known for his large-scale, highly detailed, seductive flora and fauna photo assemblages that explore our cultural relationship to the natural world. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide and is held in many private and public collections including the Denver Art Museum, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Museum of Outdoor Arts, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, Saks 5th Avenue Stores, and 21c Museum Hotels. His record of exhibitions includes solo shows at Denver Botanical Gardens, Rule Gallery in Marfa Texas, Ibis Contemporary in New Orleans, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, the Detroit Center of Contemporary Photography, and Wessell Synman in Cape Town South Africa. DeMarte's work has also been included in prominent group exhibitions, such as; “Context” at Filter Photo Space in Chicago, “The National: Best Contemporary Photography” at the Ft. Wayne Museum of Art, and “Exposure 2021” at the Contemporary Calgary Art Museum “212 Photography Istanbul”, Museum Gazhane, Istanbul, Turkey. Jason is a tenured professor of art at Eastern Michigan University. He received his B.F.A. in Photography from Colorado State University and his M.F.A in Photography from the University of Oregon.
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Adam Ekberg:
“In calculated performances that intersect with photography’s documentary potential, I explore ephemeral occurrences. Making such humble events happen is alchemy of sorts, the transformation of the mundane into the poignant. Within the constructed images, I reposition specific celebratory iconography to create minor spectacles. My process requires detailed and elaborate production outside the photographic frame so that what appears within the frame implies simplicity and straightforwardness. It is important to me that these constructions actually exist in the world, if only for the moment in which the photograph is made.”
Adam Ekberg earned his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions include George Eastman Museum, Rochester, and CLAMP, New York. Recent group exhibitions include Aperture, New York, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME, and Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA.
Ekberg has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Hewnoaks, Monson Arts, Monhegan Artists' Residency and Playa. He is the recipient of both the Society for Photographic Education’s Imagemaker Award and the Tanne Foundation Award.
His work is in the collections of the George Eastman Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Worcester Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.
When not making art, Ekberg can be found on long-distance solo bicycle trips, swimming in any body of water that will have him, teaching photography, and playing Go.
https://adamekberg.com/home.html
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Julianna Foster:
My work explores how memory, time, and representation shape our perception and understanding of the natural world—how landscapes carry histories and continually change, both through natural forces and human influence. In my ongoing project, Geographical Lore, I photograph geological sites across the U.S.—including desert formations, mountainous terrain, and shifting coastlines. These places are shaped by environmental processes, such as erosion, drought, and ecosystem instability; however, human-driven changes, including land use, resource extraction, and climate disruption, also impact them.
I’m interested in how these landscapes become records—not only of geological time, but of cultural and personal memory. By blending photographs of actual sites with constructed scenes made in my studio, I explore the tension between what is real and what is imagined. These studio interventions allow me to reinterpret what I saw and felt in the field, creating a layered view that moves between observation and invention.
Through processes such as cutting, layering, folding, and rephotographing, I transform these materials to show the fragile and impermanent nature of the earth. These physical gestures mirror the natural forces that shape the land—fragmentation, pressure, compression—and suggest how time leaves its mark.
Julianna Foster
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Xuan-Hui Ng
I began photography as self-therapy. My mum’s death plunged me into despair until a chance encounter with nature started the healing process. Its majesty gave me perspective and reignited a sense of wonder. Initially, I photographed to prolong the serenity that nature brought. Now, I photograph to celebrate my serendipitous encounters with it.
In Hokkaido, Japan, winter is brutal but the cold gives rise to diamond dust, sun-pillars and iridescent clouds. These magical phenomena, visible to the naked eye, occur due to the diffraction of sunlight through ice crystals in the air. Unfortunately, they are becoming increasingly rare as average temperatures rise and weather patterns become more erratic.
My fear that these breathtaking phenomena may someday vanish has made me pursue them in earnest. I hope my photographs can prompt people to be kinder towards the environment so that they will not be a mere record of their once brilliance.
Xuan-Hui Ng is from Singapore and now lives in Japan. She is represented by Koslov Larsen gallery in Houston. Her solo exhibitions include “Interludes” and “A Gracious Breath” at Koslov Larsen and “Transcendence: Awakening the Soul” at the Griffin Museum of Photography.
She is a Critical Mass Top 50 Finalist in 2024 and a Top 200 Finalist in 2021, 2022 and 2023. Her work has been juried into exhibitions at Davis Orton Gallery, Southeast Center for Photography, Texas Photographic Society and New York Center for Photographic Art. Publications of her work have been featured in What Will You Remember?, fotoMAGAZIN, PetaPixel, ON landscape, forum naturfotografie, etc.
BBC’s Cultural Frontline interviewed her on “Creativity and Mental Health”. She writes for ELEMENTS photography magazine, and is an instructor for Santa Fe Workshops and Nobechi Creative.
She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Thomas Jackson:
Thomas Jackson
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Questions?
For questions about this exhibition, please contact Exhibitions
Exhibitions and Programs Coordinator, exhibits@hcponline.org or 713-529-4755, ext 106.