Silver Eye

This exhibition features three artists whose work continues a lineage that can be traced from the gothic stories of writers like Edgar Allan Poe and Flannery O'Connor, to our contemporary cultural fascination with horror and true crime narratives. These photographers explore elements crucial to the Gothic: foreboding and ancient settings, villains who are at once human and mythological, and a sense of overwhelming, creeping, unstoppable fear. Dylan Hausthor’s Past the Pond, Setting Fires shows verdant and isolated New England forests that appear innocuous on their surface, but seem to hold something horrific in their depths. The woods are haunted and haunting, full of animals that evoke otherworldly spirits, and humans who teeter on the edge of madness. Rory Mulligan’s Sam I Am explores a history of violence in the Hudson River Valley. This area teems with dark tales—from the stories of Washington Irving and John Cheever to the real life horror of the Son of Sam murders—Mulligan darts between history and fiction. His stark and subtle images create a narrative of an elusive and evil masculine force. Tereza Zelenkova’s The Essential Solitude shows a figure who is either a prisoner or a recluse. Stuck in a room, alone, reading, and dreaming, she are completely shut off from the world. Though the room has a victorian sensibility, the decay around its isolated figure suggests a crushing amount of time has passed. Gothic Fictions examines how three contemporary artists play within the framework of the Gothic to create unique and palpable senses of dread.

Participating Artists

1. Dylan Haustor received their BFA from Maine College of Art and MFA from Yale University where they were awarded the John Ferguson Weir Award. Their work has been showcased nationally and internationally by the Aperture Foundation, British Journal of Photography, Photo District News, PHMuseum, Vice, Gomma, World Press Photo, LensCulture, Vogue, and in the permanent collection of the library at the Museum of Modern Art. They are a 2019 recipient of the Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists, runner-up for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, nominated for Prix Pictet 2021, a recipient of the Ellis-Beauregard Fellowship and Residency, and the winner of Burn Magazine’s Emerging Photographer’s Fund. Dylan founded Will Press, an art publication, in 2015, released their first trade edition monograph with Void Photo in 2019 with their collaborator Paul Guilmoth, and currently works as a farmer.

2. Rory Mulligan (b.1984) received a BA from Fordham University and a MFA from Yale University in 2010 where he was awarded the Ward Cheney Memorial Award. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally and is included in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Mulligan’s work has been published by J&L Books and Blind Spot Magazine.

3. Tereza Zelenkova (born 1985 in Czech Republic; lives and works in London, UK) is an artist working mainly with black and white analogue photography. Her practice often deals with mysticism, ranging from abstract ideas about death and the sacred, to documenting concrete locations tied to local mythologies or mysterious historical events. Her inspiration often comes from literature and philosophy, but she also embraces coincidence, intuition and analogy as essential working methods.