Guest Room:
Whitney Hubbs & Jermaine Francis

Guest Room is a format that fosters collaboration and sparks creative exchange. For this edition, Associate Director of Light Work Whitney Hubbs and lens-based artist and lecturer Jermaine Francis propose the theme "Photography Unbound”.

"This Guest Room approaches the photographic medium as an unstable site of friction and a 'conditional object' that refuses to sit still as bound by specific conditions. What happens when we actively sit with this instability, this fluid slippage? What happens if we shift our gaze away from the concentration on descriptive qualities of the medium and begin to see the image as what Elizabeth Edwards calls a 'relational object,' one that is always in active dialogue with its surroundings?

Leaning into the spirit of Édouard Glissant’s ‘Tout-Monde’, which embraces unpredictable openness and worldly complexity, we want to navigate the collisions and the messy complexities of the world we inhabit: the issue of representation, aesthetic strategies and the production of meaning. We want to engage with the materiality and spatial possibilities of the photographic medium embracing its textures, its vulnerability and its capacity for change, decay, and multiplicity. How can we use these strategies to unlock forms of resistance, criticality, subversion, and transformation?

We have selected artists exploring multidisciplinary approaches to lens-based practices to address a wide range of contemporary issues, welcome works that utilize everything from performance, sculpture, and cameraless photography to screengrabs, the speculative, and the magical, to challenge and expand the boundaries and potential of the medium."