We’re Just Here for the Bad Guys chronicles Brian Van Lau’s relationship with his estranged father. Lau’s father was absent during his childhood due to his incarceration. After his release, he rebuilt his life in Vietnam, remarried, and gradually disappeared from Lau’s life. Nearly a decade later, Lau traveled to Vietnam following his father’s sudden illness, and learned of his terminal cancer. During their final week together, they collaborated on a photographic project that documented his father’s unsuccessful path toward recovery. After his father’s passing, Lau returned to his hometown in Hawai‘i seeking closure, uncovering hidden correspondence that revealed previously unknown parts of his father’s life. Entrusted with dispersing his father’s ashes across O‘ahu, the artist began working with his grandparents to reconstruct this fragmented family history through photography.

Image credit: Brian Van Lau, Ritual, 2024

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Brian Van Lau (b. 1996, Honolulu, HI) is a self-taught Vietnamese American photographer based between Honolulu, HI, and Los Angeles, CA. His work often explores generational relationships, history, inheritance, and grief. His methods include connecting photographs of his own with other collected and appropriated materials. His first monograph, We’re Just Here for the Bad Guys, was published by Light Work in 2026. He is a 2025 Penumbra Workspace Artist-in-Residence, 2023 Aperture Portfolio Prize runner-up, a recipient of the 2024 Google x Aperture Creator Labs Photo Fund, a winner of the 2023 Innovate Grant, and a selected participant in the 2023 New York Portfolio Review. He has been shortlisted for the Hopper Prize and is the founder of Arcanite Pictures, an online platform and publisher dedicated to highlighting emerging artists. His work was most recently exhibited at the Hō‘ikeākea Gallery in Honolulu, HI, as part of Float On, curated by Phil Jung. Lau has lectured at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, and Northwind Art School in Port Townsend, WA. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Vogue, and many more.

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brianvanlau.com

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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

Instagram: @matriioszka

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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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Light Work lightwork.org

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