“The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air--The edge
cuts without cutting
meets--nothing--renews
itself in metal or porcelain–
(excerpt of “The Rose ” by William Carlos Williams, 1923)
Casemore Gallery is pleased to present A Petal’s Edge, an exhibition featuring emerging artists Cole Barash, Luz Carabaño, Sophronia Cook, Dylan Hausthor, Cecilia Mignon, and Chanell Stone, whose work collectively traces and reinterprets the historical function of photography in conversation with painting, printmaking, sculpture, and installation. Serving as a spatially translated I Spy book, this exhibition emphasizes hybridity as both method and message, as elements of photography can be discovered woven into every artist’s display.
The exhibition title is drawn from William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Rose,” written soon after he viewed the landmark 1913 Armory Show that debuted the work of Picasso, Matisse, Duchamp, and other groundbreaking contemporary artists to an American audience. These artists’ work served as inspiration for Williams’ own innovations on materiality, language, and form. The artists in A Petal’s Edge similarly question photography’s fixed meanings, using their more traditional photographs as points of departure to explore other media.
Meditations on the movement of silk exist as both image and material in works by Sophronia Cook. The fabric is scanned in motion, with pixels asserting its transformation into digital form embedded within other physical materials. Images and the actual silk is laid and glazed onto resin surfaces, appearing wet and fossilized, mid-sway. In Cook’s colossal silicone works, the material is combined with oil paint to reveal ghostlike traces of angelic figures and patterns.
Cole Barash also repeats his imagery and references his own journey-based experiences to reactivate discarded materials and past memories. His black-and-white photographs of alpine landscapes pay homage to Walker Evans, Robert Adams, and Dorothea Lange, while examining personal loss and place. These photographs then take on new form when translated onto discarded climbing tents, ropes, and sleeping bags, objects he has with him on his journeys. The work, as Barash says, “does not seek nostalgia”, but rather a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the complexities of grief, nature, and survival.
Image transfer as a tool and a symbol for the complex tensions between femininity and masculinity is a central fulcrum in Cecilia Mignon’s works on paper. Photography and printmaking serve as twin modes of iterative articulation of these feelings. Similar to Sophronia’s studies of silk, Mignon’s work draws from their personal archive of polaroids depicting orchids and flowers in motion, combined with scratchings from their journals. They become ways of recording, softening, and fossilizing fleeting impressions into tactile memories.
Attuned to color, found compositions, and alluring architectural forms, Luz Carabaño subtly merges her practice of photographic notation with painting. Her paintings distill and flatten selected forms from her photographs to such a degree they take on ceramic-like qualities. For the first time, this exhibition presents her photographs alongside her paintings—as both studies and complete works—showcasing a layered practice driven by abstraction and intuition.
Scale and contradiction are equally embraced in Dylan Hausthor’s works centered on the artist’s experience leading up to the birth of their first child. Their larger-than-life prints hover between the documentary and the mythic. Their series of over 200 tadpole photograms from afar present as abstract hues of greys, white, and blacks. They reveal, upon closer inspection, the gradual transformation of tadpole to salamander. Hausthor’s work reminds us that the scientific impulse to categorize can coexist with a poetic desire to contemplate one’s own evolution into a new phase in life.
The images in Chanell Stone’s series Undulation of a Rupture also resist quick consumption and demand further examination. Her work dismantles photography’s historical role as a tool of documentary revelation. In staged, darkened photographs taken on ancestral land, Stone removes the frame both literally and conceptually thus offering instead a gorgeous immersive act of reclamation.
The work in this exhibition does not offer photography as evidence, but as experience. Echoing Gertrude Stein’s “a rose is a rose is a rose,” repetition and reproduction—tools of mass image-making—are reimagined as intimate, poetic gestures. Photography shifts from capturing a “decisive moment” to preserving a distinct feeling: a flicker of silk, an eddy in a pond, a petal’s edge
