Silver Eye

Radial Survey is Silver Eye’s flagship biennial exhibition featuring preeminent emerging and mid-career photographic artists based within 300 miles of Pittsburgh. This third edition, Presence, includes seven artists nominated by Radial Survey Vol.2 artists and selected by Silver Eye’s curators.

These seven artists create work that invites us to explore the relationships between presence, visibility, and absence. Recontextualizing family and found photographs, reimagining genres, and affirming their unique subjective experiences, these artists create visually compelling languages that recognize and subvert forces larger than ourselves. In doing so, they question learned ways of seeing and how these affect our contemporary experience.

Radial Survey Vol.3 will be accompanied by an extensive catalog, including original essays by Anna Mirzayan, Sean Beauford, Silver Eye Executive Director Leo Hsu, and Deputy Director of Programs Helen Trompeteler. A symposium with artists and scholars from around the region will be held on November 3, 2023, to discuss the exhibition’s themes and its broader implications, and to reinforce community around the powerful experience of photography and art.

Radial Survey Vol.3 is generously supported by The Leonian Foundation and Henry Simonds.

Participating Artists

1. Akea Brionne is an interdisciplinary researcher and artist, exploring the relationship between history, social geography and post-colonial identity politics. Working at the intersection of lens-based media and textiles, her work analyzes the impact of colonialism on the African Diaspora, primarily within American social constructs, and its impact on landscapes, cultural storytelling, memory, and assimilation. Brionne received a dual degree in Photography and Humanistic Studies from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Brionne is originally from New Orleans, Louisiana and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. She currently lives and works between Baltimore, Detroit, and Kansas City, MO and is an Assistant Professor at the Kansas City Art Institute.

2. Larry W. Cook is an interdisciplinary artist working across photography, video, and mixed media. Cook received his MFA from George Washington University (2013) and his BA in Photography from SUNY Plattsburgh (2010). Cook has exhibited his work nationally at the Brooklyn Museum (2023), the Mississippi Museum of Art (2022), the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art (2021), and internationally at Schiefe Zähne in Germany and the Venice Biennial in Venice, Italy (2022). His work is in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Harvard Art Museums, Baltimore Museum of Art, and other institutions. Cook has held artists-in-residences at Light Work and The Nicholson Project, among others. Cook is currently an Associate Professor at Howard University.

3. Alanna Fields is a mixed-media artist and archivist whose work unpacks Black queer history through a multidisciplinary engagement with photographic archives. Fields’ work has been featured in exhibitions at Yossi Milo Gallery, Yancey Richardson Gallery, Fragment Gallery, Latchkey Gallery, David Castillo Gallery, Kohn Gallery and Residency Art Gallery. She has participated in museum exhibitions at The High Museum of Art, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Plug In ICA, SF Camerawork, and shown work at Art Basel Miami, Expo Chicago and Felix Art Fair LA. Fields is a Gordon Parks Foundation Scholar and has participated in residencies at Fountainhead Arts, TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image, Silver Arts Projects, Light Work, Baxter St. CCNY, and Gallery Aferro. She received her MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute and is a Lecturer of Photography at Howard University. Fields has given artist talks at the Aperture Foundation, Light Work, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Parsons New School, Syracuse University, and Stanford University. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Aperture, FOAM, and The Atlantic amongst others. Fields lives and works between Washington, D.C., and New York City.

4. Marissa Long works across a range of media including photography and sculpture. Long alters, interrupts and recontextualizes familiar objects, transforming them into signifiers for human emotion; Long challenges a viewer’s expectations by subverting expected outcomes, thereby shifting the focus from the imagery itself to a viewer’s complicated perception of it. Long holds a BFA from Corcoran College of Art & Design (2006). Her photography and sculpture have been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions including Instruction Manual at the AFA Gallery at NOVA (Alexandria, VA, 2020); Borrowed From Dust at Arlington Arts Center (2019); Luminiferous Aether at Transformer (Washington, DC, 2017) and Offerings at Civilian Art Projects (Washington, DC, 2013). Long’s work has been reviewed and featured in publications including The Washington Post and Washington City Paper.

5. Eduardo L Rivera is an artist whose current work contemplates the personal histories that ripple through his childhood home near the Arizona-Mexico border. His photographs have been exhibited nationally and appeared in Light Work, Aperture, and The New York Times Magazine. Eduardo received a BFA from Arizona State University (2011), an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art (2016), and was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2019). Instagram: @Eduardolrivera_ Image: Tied, 2016

6. Shane Rocheleau (MFA, VCU) is an American photographer who confronts the endemic position of toxic masculinity and white supremacy within the American experience. Rocheleau has exhibited internationally, and his three monographs – You Are Masters Of The Fish And Birds And All The Animals (2018), The Reflection In The Pool (2019), and Lakeside (2022) – are published by Gnomic Book. Rocheleau is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and currently lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

7. Lisa Toboz is a self-taught, Pittsburgh-based artist with a background in writing and literature. Her work explores self-portraiture and creativity as a form of healing using various Polaroid cameras and film. She is inspired by vernacular photography, Victorian spirit photography, and ‘70s supernatural movies, as well as reading fiction. Her photo books include Dwell (Polyseme, 2020) and The Long Way Home (Static Age UK, 2018). An editor by trade, she has exhibited internationally, and her Polaroid photography can be found in various publications including Lenscratch, Reed magazine, SHOTS magazine, and Polaroid Now (Chronicle Books, 2021).