In her first US solo exhibition, Karolina Wojtas is sending us a conceptual care package, as an installation titled Made in Poland. Presented here are images of her family, friends, sometimes herself, kitsch objects, and folkish cultural treasures. These images are printed onto inkjet paper and textiles; soft sculptures, a video, and a text piece in the form of a letter together make up Wojtas’s own little fun fair in the Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery.

There is a cultural legend in Poland about a “rich uncle from America” that everyone’s parents or grandparents used to have. This mythological uncle who emigrated from the US would send back care packages with clothes, food, and little treasures from America. This exhibition flips the tale into Wojtas’s own fable and conjures up a rich aunt from Poland who mails Polish cultural treasures to her nephew in America.

Wojtas’s work derives from her surroundings and experiences—childhood, education, siblings, first love, and death. Her images originate from amateur pictures found on the internet; all taken in situations that are almost impossible to explain. She is an artist whose work combines photography, installation, and performance to create spaces full of surprise, childlike imagination, and spontaneity. For her, art is an endless game and experiment, where audiences become part of the experience.

Made in Poland inhabits an unencumbered visual maze of play that is free of restrictions and traditional conventions—all birthed from Wojtas’s imagination and let loose in Syracuse. This project is truly an export of experimentation and curiosity—like a traveling souvenir shop, but with an underlying absurdity that is both terrifying and terrific.

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Karolina Wojtas (b. 1996, Poland) has presented her works in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Poland and abroad, at the Asama International Photo Festival, Japan (2025), Oslo Negative (2024), Foto Arsenal Wien (2023), and Foam Amsterdam (2021), to name only a few. She is a two-time recipient of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage scholarship and has received numerous awards and nominations, including an Images Vevey Book Award 2025–26 Honorable Mention. Her work has appeared in such publications as the British Journal of Photography, Foam Magazine, The Guardian, and King Kong Magazine. Wojtas graduated from the Lodz Film School and the Institute of Creative Photography in the Czech Republic. In 2019 she opened her own museum in her home village of Podkarpacie, Poland.

Cover Image: Karolina Wojtas, from the project, Made in Poland, 2026.

karolinawojtas.com

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Sasha Phyars-Burgess: Everything Nice

September 8–December 5, 2025

Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery

Reception: Thurs, Sep 18, 5-7pm

Sasha Phyars-Burgess’s photographic project Everything Nice traces her family history through Portugal, the Dominican Republic, Florida, and Louisiana, following the paths of sugarcane farmed on colonial plantations and the transatlantic slave trade in relation to her ancestors. The photographs are taken in various locations: Madeira, Portugal, the Dominican Republic, Florida, and Louisiana. The pictures provide clues and details that are layered into a larger story.

Looking back at history and locating the present, Phyars-Burgess is thinking through the idea that we are all living in a history, whether it is acknowledged or not. Once acknowledged, and if we allow ourselves to live with the past, with choices made by and for others, we can access a wider view of the present day.

Through research and picture-making, Phyars-Burgess’s ongoing project affords us a better understanding of globalization and its languages, and shows us that places which at first glance look “ethnic” can be regarded differently.

The work’s title, Everything Nice, is the name of a song by Popcaan. In it, he speaks about the hardships and struggles that people are going through while also joining together in community, getting to the heart of the matter, and being present. This exhibition invites us to slowly look, ask questions, and decipher information to uncover possible and actual answers.

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Sasha Phyars-Burgess.

b. 1988.

Scorpio.

Black.

Alive.

sashaphyars-burgess.com

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Aaron Turner: The Archive as Liberation

May 12–August 29, 2025

Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery

Reception: Friday, July 25th, 5-7pm

The Archive as Liberation is a publication and exhibition organized by Aaron Turner (Light Work artist–in-residence, 2018, and Light Work exhibiting artist, 2021). Turner has gathered a unique group of artists and writers to engage in dialogue around archival photographic methods. Contributors include Andre Bradley, calista lyon, Raymond Thompson Jr., Harrison D. Walker, and Savannah Wood, alongside writing by Chisato Hughes, Alec Kaus, Andrew Martinez, Aaron Turner, Amelia Wallin, and Wendel A. White, with a foreword by the book’s editor, Donasia Tillery. The publication was designed by Elana Schlenker.

Tillery writes, “What if memory is not solely an act of recollection, but of discovery and creation? The Archive as Liberation considers this question from the perspectives of subjects who lack access to traditional modes of documentation—Black and Indigenous cultures creatively preserved despite systemic erasure, landscapes that bore witness to colonial conquests, and the lineages that continue to survive in their wake. These works prompt us to consider not just what we remember but how we remember. In doing so, they work to inspire a more authentic vision of the past and a liberated vision of the future.”

To mark the launch of this publication, Light Work has mounted an exhibition highlighting many of the contributing artists. This exhibition includes work by Andre Bradley, Chisato Hughes, Alec Kaus, calista lyon, Raymond Thompson Jr., Harrison D. Walker, Wendel A. White, and Savannah Wood.

The exhibition also includes a unique reading room curated by Turner with artists’ books from his personal collection and pieces from Light Work’s collection. The reading room will be in Light Work’s Lab for the duration of the exhibition.

Image Credit: Harrison D. Walker, Between Two Worlds, Footnotes, 2025

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Aaron Turner is a photographer, educator, and independent curator, born and raised in the Arkansas Delta. Turner holds an MA from Ohio University and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts. In his studio practice, he uses the 4×5 view camera to create still-life studies on identity, history, abstraction, and archives. He has organized the following selected exhibitions and symposiums: And Let It Remain So: Women of the African Diaspora (Phoenix Art Museum, 2022), Time & Empathy: Arkansas Photographer Geleve Grice (University of Arkansas, 2021–22), and Resounding Sovereign Expressions: Resurgent Indigenuity in Ozark Arts Practice & Scholarship (University of Arkansas, 2025). He most recently joined the University of Michigan’s Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design as an assistant professor.

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