Silver Eye

Radial Survey is Silver Eye’s flagship biennial exhibition, showcasing compelling new artistic voices from within 300 miles of Pittsburgh. This fourth edition features six innovative artists nominated by Radial Survey Vol.3 artists and selected by Silver Eye’s curators:

Amelia Burns (Detroit)
McNair Evans (Richmond)
Christine Lorenz (Pittsburgh)
Juan Orrantia (Rochester)
Ian John Solomon (Detroit)
SHAN Wallace (Baltimore)

Through varied approaches, these artists develop dynamic visual languages that question photography’s conventions and redefine its purpose on their own terms. Together, all six artists boldly reimagine the future of photography through urgent, experimental work that deeply resonates with our contemporary moment.

Radial Survey Vol.4 is accompanied by an extensive catalog featuring original essays Tara Fay Coleman, Jessica Lynne, Matthew Newton, Silver Eye Executive Director Leo Hsu, and Deputy Director & Director of Programs Helen Trompeteler.

Support Radial Survey

Your support brings Radial Survey to life. Help us amplify new voices and explore what it means to make art in the Radius. Become a patron or sponsor by September 5 to be recognized in the catalog.

Support Radial Survey and amplify bold new voices in photography

Our Patrons & Sponsors

With heartfelt thanks to our early patrons and sponsors for their generous support of Radial Survey Vol.4

Supporting Sponsors: Laura Heberton-Schlomchik & Mark Schlomchik, Andi Irwin & Brian Wongchaowart

Contributing Sponsors: Susan Abramson, Concept Art Gallery, Duolingo, Chris & Dawn Fleischner, Christine Holtz & David Scott, Lea Simonds

Premier Patrons: Matthew Conboy & Heather Pinson, Liz Dewar & Helen Trompeteler, Raminder Hansra & Harinder Singh, Evan Mirapaul & Sybil Streeter

Supporting Patrons: Annabelle Javier & Jason Wilburn, Terry Irwin & Gideon Kossoff, Melissa McSwigan & Robert Raczka Kamal & Milena Nigam

Participating Artists

1. Amelia Burns is a photographer and collage artist whose work navigates the cultural and physical landscapes of the U.S. A Pratt Institute BFA (2005) and Cranbrook Academy of Art MFA (2023) graduate, she has traveled through nearly every state, documenting the interplay between nature and human impact. Her images, whether photographic or collage-based, merge beauty, humor, pain, and solitude, transforming cultural fragments into vignettes of resilience. Drawing from the mysticism of her Irish Catholic upbringing and critiques of capitalism, Burns explores the tension between authenticity and artifice, creating visceral portraits of contemporary Americana’s darkness, endurance, and quiet resistance.

2. McNair Evans is a nationally exhibiting artist represented by galleries in San Francisco, CA and Asheville, NC, an active guest lecturer, and working photographer. His projects explore themes of shared experiences and identity, and are recognized for their literary character and metaphoric use of light. He is the recipient of numerous awards including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the Innovation in Documentary Arts Award from Duke University, and the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship. His books and prints are held in public and private collections including the SFMOMA, UC Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University.

3. Christine Lorenz uses the tools of macro photography to explore the ways we find meaning in materials. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a BA from The Ohio State University. Her photographs have been exhibited at photo-eye gallery, Santa Fe; PEP, Berlin; and the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition. Her work has been featured by Lenscratch, Photolucida, Refract Journal, Der Greif, and Fraction Magazine. Collections include the Community College of Allegheny County and the Tomayko Foundation. In 2025 she was a Gilbert Fellow at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. She teaches the history of photography and art writing at Duquesne University and Point Park University.

4. Juan Orrantia is a Colombian photographer who spent much of his adult life in South Africa. Rooted in experiences of dislocation and postcoloniality, his practice experiments with forms of unsettling histories of vision and representation through color, appropriation, intervention, and printed media. Juan's first book "Like Stains of Red Dirt" (Dalpine 2020) was winner of the Fiebre Dummy Award. He has also published "A Machete Pelao" (Cdf 2022), winner of the Fotolibro Latinoamericano Centro de Fotografia de Montevideo, and “O”, a companion to A Machete--as part of AñZ-Fotografia Expandida en Latinoamérica (Raya editorial, 2024). His books are included in collections like MoMA (NY and SF), the Smithsonian Museum of African Art Library, and the Wits Museum of Art. Juan has exhibited at the Bamako Biennale, Art Photo Barcelona, Centro de la Imagen Mexico City, and reviews of his work appear in Aperture, Nearest Truth, BJP, Africa is a Country among others. He is Assistant Professor of Fine Art Photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and holds an MFA in Photography from Hartford Art School.

5. Ian John Solomon is an interdisciplinary artist-journalist from Detroit, Michigan. Ian's lens based practice explores themes of self, ancestry, community, land and ecology. Deeply motivated by environment, Ian’s practice asserts a relationship to the natural world as a necessary vehicle to personal and communal actualization, utilizing space and place as foundation for urgent community conversations spanning the spiritual to the political. As Host of PBS-Great Lakes Now segment "Ian Outside" and founder of Detroit based outdoor organization 'Amplify Outside' his art practice extends from a social practice of connecting Black Midwesterners to natural spaces.

   Ian has exhibited and won awards across the Midwest, including being a 2025 BMI Summer Institute Fellow at University of Illinois Chicago, 2024 Playground Detroit Fellow and 2024 Cranbrook Art Museum Purchase Award Nominee. In 2024 Ian received two Emmy nominations, an Emmy Award and a First Place award in Environmental Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists. Ian received his MFA in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2024.

6. SHAN Wallace (b. 1991) is a nomadic award-winning interdisciplinary artist, archivist, and image-maker, from Baltimore, MD. Wallace utilizes a range of mediums to weave narratives and imagine new stories. Rooted in image-making techniques such as photography, film, and collage, as well as in situ installations, these mediums serve as the foundation of her artistic practice. She has exhibited work internationally in galleries and museums, including The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, CA, Gavlak Gallery Los Angeles, The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C., August Wilson Center in Pittsburgh, The Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts in New York, Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work is held in both public and private collections across the U.S., includingThe Whitney Museum, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum, and Johns Hopkins University, as well as various private collections.Shan lives and works in many spaces between Brooklyn, New York and Baltimore.