Joshua Berg

Afterimage: Portraiture as Memory includes works by photographers and lens-based artists from Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky engaging with the remnants of what has been and the echoes of what is yet to come. Every photograph leaves a mark on the viewer and the maker, a visual and emotional connection that extends beyond the moment it was taken. Portraits become cherished artifacts and family albums transform into archives filled with love and resilience.

Afterimage: Portraiture as Memory invites one to pause and reflect on how photographs can bridge distances, connecting the past with the present, the self with others, and here with there. The camera is not just a tool for recording; it transforms moments and gazes into images that resonate beyond their creation and explores connections between memory, identity, and time through portraiture and contemporary storytelling. In this exhibition, artists revisit family photographs, document the closeness of current relationships, and envision futures in which today’s images become tomorrow’s proof. Whether personal, collective, documentary, or experimental, these works showcase photography’s quiet ability to capture who we were, who we are, who we might become, and how we might be remembered.

Artists: Alane Shoemaker, Alyssa McRoberts, Amy Kim, Cassidy Brauner, Cate Cole, Claire Wiedman, Clarissa Brown, Clementine Deck, Crystal Tursich, Daniel McInnis, Edmund Boateng, Elan Schwartz, Ella Wiggins, Frank Geiser, Grant Lawler, Ian Gunn, Jesse Ly, Jessica Raetzke, Julie Rae Powers, Logan St Hillaire, Michael Molloy, Michaelann Kelley, Nicholas Shellman, Sarah Smith, Swati Chopra

Also with Joshua Berg (artist), John-David Richardson (artist)

Cost: Free to the Public

Source: fotofocus.org (opens in a new tab)

In an age marked by accelerated change and ecological instability, Natural Fictions proposes a slower, stranger, and more speculative gaze. The exhibition gathers artists who harness photography’s potential to imagine new relationships with the natural world—ones that are not bound by documentary fidelity but instead embrace transformation, fiction, and play. Through their work, the landscape becomes a site of experimentation and wonder, where speculative futures and unseen pasts coexist in surreal, poetic, and scientific inquiry.

The artists in this exhibition use the lens not merely to capture the world as it is, but to destabilize it. They fold time, alter perspective, and merge disciplines, constructing images that evoke geological duration, cosmic scale, and embodied mythologies. Some simulate environments that never existed, while others render familiar terrain uncanny through shifts in material, scale, or cultural reference. Their practices explore the camera as both a tool and collaborator in seeing beyond the visible and the known.

Natural Fictions considers how photography can resist linearity and certainty. What new narratives emerge when nature is approached as something invented as much as it is observed? What futures might become imaginable when science meets spirit or when perspective is shaped by play instead of conquest? Natural Fictions invites viewers to look sideways—and forward—at the environments we inhabit, inherit, and imagine.

Artists: Lydia Smith, Mareiwa Miller, Ruby Que, Sean McFarland

Also with Joshua Berg (artist), Heesoo Kwon (artist), Phillip Maisel (artist)

Cost: Free to the Public

Source: fotofocus.org (opens in a new tab)

Noon Light Bites

1pm Natural Fictions

Conversation with Artists Joshua Berg, Covington, KY; Heesoo Kwon, Los Angeles, CA; and Phillip Maisel, San Francisco, CA; moderated by Curator Lindsay Albert, Program Manager, KADIST, San Francisco, CA

2pm Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Compressed Tenses

Conversation with Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Artist, Los Angeles, CA, and Carmen Winant, Artist and Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at the Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

3pm Nancy Rexroth: Secrets of My Power

Conversation with Curator Nathaniel M. Stein, Curator of Photography at the Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH, and Elizabeth Leitzell, Photographer and Short Filmmaker, Philadelphia, PA

4pm Trevor Paglen: the most merciful thing in the world

Performance-lecture by Trevor Paglen, Artist, New York, NY, and San Francisco, CA

5pm The Long View Keynote

Lecture by Daniel Immerwahr, Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, Chicago, IL

Assistive Listening Devices (ALDs) and Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) are provided

Artists: Nancy Rexroth

Also with Daniel Immerwahr (speaker), Heesoo Kwon (speaker), Elizabeth Leitzell (speaker), Phillip Maisel (speaker), Trevor Paglen (speaker), Paul Mpagi Sepuya (speaker), Nathaniel M. Stein (speaker), Carmen Winant (speaker)

Cost: Free to Biennial Pass Holders

Source: fotofocus.org (opens in a new tab)

Conversation with Artists Joshua Berg, Covington, KY; Heesoo Kwon, Los Angeles, CA; and Phillip Maisel, San Francisco, CA; moderated by Curator Lindsay Albert, Program Manager, KADIST, San Francisco, CA

Also with Heesoo Kwon (speaker), Phillip Maisel (speaker)

Cost: Free to Biennial Pass Holders

Source: fotofocus.org (opens in a new tab)