Filter Photo is pleased to present Locus of a Gesture, a three-person exhibition curated by Kristie Kahns, featuring work by David Ondrik, Dakota Mace, and Daniel Hojnacki.

Since its inception, the medium of photography has emerged as an invitation to observe the subtle alchemies in the natural world and within ourselves. Through such observations, some of the earliest photographic objects were made not with the apparatus of the camera but simply through the action of light and a sensitized surface. Nearly two hundred years after the invention of photography, as the field has fractured and transformed, artists continue to investigate photosensitive materials through camera-less interventions.

Locus of a Gesture presents the work of three artists that utilize experimental and historical techniques to elicit a new lexicon of contemporary photography. Foregoing the camera for a more intuitive approach to the medium, David Ondrik, Dakota Mace, and Daniel Hojnacki create images that explore painterly abstraction and encoded gestures as a method for dealing with grief, transmitting ancestral knowledge, or suspending cycles of precipitation.

In his series Inheritance, David Ondrik uses unconventional development techniques to coax a palette of violets and ochres out of the gelatin silver paper, subsequently collaged and stitched together to form soft shapes blooming from the dark surface. The evidence of abrasion and urgency of the sutures suggest a consuming grief that is impossible to mend.

Dakota Mace explores Diné epistemology and spirituality by using the chemigram process to create abstractions of symbolic designs found in Diné history and material culture. By working with an emulsion imbued with silver, Mace tethers each unique print in her series Náhookǫs Bikǫʼ directly to the traditions of Navajo silversmithing, revealing a remarkable synthesis of concept, material, and ancestral memory.

Using the historical printmaking technique of cliché-verre, Daniel Hojnacki records the ephemeral and subconscious patterns of daily life, eloquently seen in his triptych of Rain Drawings. In his Body Language series consisting of 26 unique silver gelatin prints—a subtle nod to the letters of the alphabet—he evokes the gestural language of Surrealist automatism by drawing upon the volatile glass substrate covered in smoke soot with delicate, meditative traces.

In these works, the emphasis on materiality challenges common conceptions of a photograph, and these artists find new possibilities in the qualities of abstraction. The photosensitive surface of gelatin silver paper becomes a site of haptic mediations, possessing a latent alchemy to convey personal narratives through an encoded language. While the dominant history of photography presents the fixed, representational image, these camera-less works, following in the trails of generations of experimental practitioners, foreground the ephemerality of the medium and its tenuous relationship to memory.

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Tags: Chicago, Dakota Mace, Daniel Hojnacki, David Ondrik, Filter Space, LOCUS OF A GESTURE, West Town