Spring 2015
Silver Eye Center for Photography
A World Imagined features the work of Kelli Connell (Chicago, IL) and Sara Macel (Brooklyn, NY) who each explore the emotional and psychological terrain of personal relationships. Each artists’ projects offer opportunities to reflect on authorship, on photographic construction, and on ways in which we define relationships through our subjective experiences of them. The exhibition is organized by Leo Hsu, adjunct professor, Carnegie Mellon University, writer, and photographer, and David Oresick, Executive Director, Silver Eye Center for Photography.
Participating Artists
Kelli Connell’s work has been widely received and included in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Her work is in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Microsoft, Haggerty Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Dallas Museum of Art. Connell’s first full length monograph entitled Kelli Connell: Double Life was released by DECODE Books in August, 2011. Other publications include MP3: Midwest Photographersʼ Publication Project (Aperture: New York and Museum of Contemporary Photography: Chicago, 2006), Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography (Phaidon Press: London, 2006), Photo Art: The New World of Photography (Aperture: New York, 2008), and Auto Focus: The Self-Portrait in Contemporary Photography (The Monacelli Press: New York, 2010).
Sara Macel (b. 1981 Houston, TX) is an artist and photographer based in Queens, NY. She received her BFA in Photography + Imaging from NYU (2003) and her MFA in Photography, Video & Related Media from the School of Visual Arts (2011). Macel is currently the Photography Program Coordinator and Photography Instructor at the State University of New York (SUNY) Rockland Community College. Her photographic work is narratively-based and often deals with themes of the archive, family, memory, place and time.
Macel’s work has been internationally exhibited and is in various private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Cleveland Museum of Art, Harry Ransom Center, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock. Sara was named one of PDN's 30 Photographers to Watch in 2015. She is a recipient of the Individual Photographer's Fellowship Grant from the Aaron Siskind Foundation and was an artist-in-residence at Light Work in Syracuse, NY in 2017.
Her first monograph, May the Road Rise to Meet You (Daylight Books), was named one of PDN’s best photo books of the year. A traveling exhibition of that work was shown in solo shows around the country. Her new series What Did the Deep Sea Say received an Editor’s Choice award at CENTER Santa Fe and is out now from Kehrer Verlag.