High Water

March 5- April 24, 2021
Candela Gallery, Richmond, Virginia

“Candela Gallery is thrilled to present High Water, a debut solo exhibition by Richmond, Virginia based photographer, Emily White. In response to our modern world, inundated by digital diversions and perpetual tail-chasing, Emily White has staked out essential and reverent landscapes. White approaches the landscape genre using a mix of 19th century and contemporary processes and manages to bridge the nostalgia for a familiar place and the discordant emotions of the southern wilds. 

While exploring process and genre, much of the resonance in White’s serene and mantic images, a mix of tintypes and darkroom prints, is tethered to White’s overflowing feelings of home, of her southern roots, and her search for refined stillness in a chaotic world. Weaving together several distinct bodies, High Water’s textural studies of thick water, overgrown greenery, and enveloping canopies of elongated trees thread a universal narrative that reminds us again, despite all of our protests, that nature is going to have the last word. “ 
Candela’s online exhibition

“But I longed to always stay attached to my home, to my family. That’s the golden thread that keeps me tied to eternity.” - Dolly Parton

Much of my work speaks to intimate spaces that have significance to me, and I wanted to unpack from where this attachment to place comes, as well as consider something that could potentially speak to a wider audience. In considering a unifying concept for this show, this quote by Dolly came to mind. Funnily enough, I misremembered it, and in that misremembering found the theme. As I recalled the last line was, “…That’s the golden thread that keeps us tied to humanity.” I remembered it as speaking to the collective experience of being attached to place, and as that shared sentimentality being what links us to one another.

Front gallery exhibited original tintypes and gelatin silver prints made from collodion negatives and large format film.

“The landscapes I have in mind are not part of the unseen world in a psychic sense, nor are they part of the Unconscious. They belong to the world that lies visibly, about us. They are unseen merely because they are not perceived.”

—Paul Nash

This exhibition came at a time when I was experiencing a creative transition away from literal imagery, towards more experiential and experimental notions. It felt important to acknowledge from where I come creatively, which is from traditional darkroom work, as well as share the direction that I am following presently. This new direction is displayed in a light installation, that shares illuminated layered ambrotypes, presented in various ways. I wanted to undermine the fetishization of the “unique” aspect affiliated with collodion and produce “duplicate images”. I layered these duplicates and created visual distortions and optic effects. The light boxes are motion-sensored, coming to light as you approach—I wanted to play with glass negatives resembling screens and highlight their shared materiality. This installation aims to immerse you in these spaces and to question the contemporary photographic object.