Curated by Jon Feinstein and featuring work by Gina Costa, Ruben Natal-San Miguel, George Nobechi, Jessica Prugh, and Krista Wortendyke, Next is on view September 14 – October 13 with a public reception that coincides with the opening of Re/member/construct and we like small things v.2 at Filter Space and kicks off the 2018 Filter Photo Festival on Friday, September 28, 6-9pm.  The full Members’ exhibition can be seen online here.

“Seeing a common theme among many of the submissions to Filter’s annual juried members’ exhibition, I selected 5 photographers from different backgrounds who are making work that addresses a sense of confusion about the world as we know it. They use photography to process varying degrees of existential disorientation, catastrophe, and failure, whether it’s political, personal, or somewhere in between. Ultimately, these 5 artists stray from heavy-handed statements in exchange for something open-ended and conceptually gray.

Ruben Natal-San Miguel takes a strangely electric lens to photograph the devastating impact of 2017’s Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico’s landscape and his family. His photos of Maria’s aftermath – often full of bright, bold colors – show how disaster and the pain that surrounds it can ultimately happen under a vibrant sunny sky. Shooting various landscapes through the windows of trains, buses, hotel rooms and other temporary spaces wherever he is, George Nobechi’sseries Unmoored processes the photographer’s sense of rootlessness after leaving his home in NYC on a 990-day “odyssey” following the death of his father. In similar fashion, Jessica Prugh’s quiet anti-road trip – with pictures ranging from a window-washer photographed through foggy glass to the back of a hearse – present an ongoing desire to be elsewhere or alone. Gina Costa turns this even further inward, photographing ambiguously staged black and white scenes through the windows of suburban homes to parallel her own questioning of truth in memory.

Flipping back to the world at large, Krista Wortendyke’s series “#MassObservation” points to the numbing effect social media can have on mass culture and its’ unfortunate consequences toward how we experience violence. Cropping highly pixelated photos of race riots found across social media into “Instagram-worthy” squares, Wortendyke questions how brutality is all-too-often aestheticized within our current image-saturated culture.

Whether it’s Wortendyke’s response to a world splitting at its seams, or Prugh and Costa’s sense of inward introspection, these five artists use photography to understand the many layers of conflict and unease”.

Jon Feinstein, Curator

Jon Feinstein is a Seattle and New York City-based curator, writer, photographer, co-founder of Humble Arts Foundation and Seattle’s soon-to-open gallery “Found Space.” Jon has curated numerous exhibitions over the past decade, including Future Isms at Glassbox Gallery in Seattle, WA; Radical Color at Newspace Center for Photography, in Portland, Oregon; Another NY for Art-Bridge at The Barclays Arena in Brooklyn, NY; and 31 Women in Art Photography at Hasted Kraetleur in NYC. His projects have been featured in Aperture, The New York Times, The New Republic, BBC, VICE, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, Feature Shoot and American Photo, and his writing has appeared in TIME, Slate, GOOD, Daylight, and PDN. His online group show, originally titled “New Cats in Art Photography” was recently published as a hard-bound book, Humble Cats by Yoffy Press.

Image Credit: Jessica Prugh

The full Members’ exhibition can be seen online here.

Exhibition Dates: September 14 – October 13, 2018
Festival Reception: September 28 | 6 pm – 9 pm
Location: Fogelson Studio 1821 W. Hubbard St., Ste. 208
Gallery Hours: Monday – Saturday 10 am – 4 pm