Milestones: Finding Our Way

A milestone is a wayfinding device, a roadside stone that marks distances between destinations. Figuratively, the word milestone signifies a noteworthy step or stage in the course of history or a person’s life. They make us pause to consider where we’ve been and where we’re going. In Milestones: Finding Our Way, 12 regional lens-based artists contemplate significant places and events while utilizing a range of time-laden approaches to photography. 

Staged tableaux, long exposure techniques, and hand-stitched prints are tools wielded by Jingyin Che, Ishmael McKinney, Amena Sheikh, and Audra J. Shields to expose intimacy and distance within specific communities. Exploring academic and carceral institutions, the artists reveal both groundbreaking and everyday interactions, presenting achievement and progress not as a finish line, but as a negotiated marker along an evolving path.

Through digital prints, video, laser cutting, and split-tone gelatin silver prints, Tom Croce, Kent Krugh, Madde Lesnewich, and Michael Tittel utilize traditional and innovative approaches to landscape. Encouraging environmental stewardship and cultural reflection, their images of plains, watersheds, and mountains invite a longer look. 

Within solvent ink prints on steel, installation art, photo lithographs, and macro prints, Robert Coomer, Will Jones, Fredrik Marsh, and Ardine Nelson find an appreciation of aging and death. Loss, remembrance, mystery, and imperfection are revealed as personal and universal manifestations. Cumulatively, Milestones: Finding Our Way inspires a broad perspective of place and time. 

Artists: Jingyin Che, Robert Coomer, Tom Croce, Will Jones, Kent Krugh, Madde Lesnewich, Fredrik Marsh, Ishmael McKinney, Ardine Nelson, Amena Sheikh, Audra J. Shields, Michael Tittel