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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Light Work lightwork.org

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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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Light Work lightwork.org

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Nabil Harb’s project Mater si, magistra no (a macaronic phrase that translates as “Mother yes, teacher no”) presents photographs that describe and depict moments and scenes within his hometown of Lakeland in Polk County, Florida. This Central Florida location is both the backdrop and main character of Harb’s visual narrative: a story that emits surreal qualities which twist ideas of the region through photography’s formal language into a conceptual idea—an idea of how to describe the atmosphere of a place without words. Harb writes, “The landscape is the perfect reflection of our society, our ultimate index—it holds our histories, our secrets, our failures, and our hopes for the future.”

Harb uses his camera to look rather than gaze at the wily scenes and moving bodies; his images disturb the before and after of a photograph by showing a moment extended or an instant flashed with a strobe. The project title informs Harb’s reasons and choices around his subject matter with his opinions and beliefs about this landscape, the people who inhabit it and move through it, and his subjecthood. The history of land usage in Central Florida greatly influences where he goes to photograph and how he looks at his surroundings. The narratives in his work are conflicting and intermingle with one another. The overriding story is one of man versus nature, of beauty and destruction coexisting in an atmosphere that is surreal, seductive, and breathtaking. Where the conflicting notions of destruction and rebirth intersect is also the point at which Nabil Harb’s formalism and conceptual photographic practice meet, showing us the potential for beauty in destruction and foreboding rebirth.

Image credit: Nabil Harb, Lake Hancock, 2024

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Nabil Harb is a Palestinian American photographer born and raised in Polk County, Florida, where he still lives. Harb received his BA in anthropology from the University of South Florida and his MFA in photography from Yale University. His work has been featured in Aperture, The Atlantic, ArtReview, The Guardian, and A24.

nabiljharb.com/

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Special thanks to Daylight Blue Media daylightblue.com

Light Work lightwork.org

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