PHOTOGRAPHY INTO SCULPTURE - AN HOMAGE AND AN UPDATE, GROUP EXHIBITION

CURATED BY L. MIKELLE STANDBRIDGE

PHOTOGRAPHY INTO SCULPTURE — AN HOMAGE AND AN UPDATE

traveling exhibition - FALL 2025 - WINTER 2026: CASA REGIS: CENTER FOR CULTURE AND CONTEMPORARY ART, MOSSO, ITALY | SPRING 2026 - EL NIDO BY VC PROJECTS, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORINA | FALL 2026 - immix gallery, PARIS, FRANCE

A group exhibition featuring
L. Mikelle Standbridge, Bennie Flores Ansell, Roberta Toscano, Fabiola Ubani,
Oona Hyland, Dawn Surratt, Silvia Gaffurini, and Olga Caldas

Curated by L. Mikelle Standbridge
Adapted for El Nido with assistance by Victoria Chapman

El Nido by VC Projects
Los Angeles, California

Text by Victoria Chapman

On my vanity rests a 1956 photograph of my mother—her smile, her grace, her style still brings me joy. Each day I pause before it, reminded that it has been two years since her passing. Photographs are fragments of memory, anchors of time and place, evidence of what once was—or what we imagined could be.

Photography’s history, traced to both France and England, carries this duality of evidence and imagination. In France, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre pioneered the first permanent images; in England, William Henry Fox Talbot introduced the negative–positive process that shaped modern photographic practice. Wherever its roots are claimed, photography has remained constant in its ability to witness and preserve, even as it evolves and reshapes what it can become.

This sense of photography as both document and transformation resonates with Photography into Sculpture — An Homage and an Update, curated by L. Mikelle Standbridge. The exhibition revisits the discourse initiated by Peter C. Bunnell’s landmark 1970 exhibition Photography into Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, which challenged photography’s perceived flatness and opened the medium to objecthood, installation, and material experimentation.

Originally presented at Casa Regis: Center for Culture and Contemporary Art in northern Italy, the exhibition arrives in Los Angeles in a more distilled form. Adapted for El Nido by VC Projects, this presentation offers a concentrated reflection on the larger curatorial framework. Rather than recreating the full installation from Casa Regis, the works shown here present a minimal consideration—allowing each piece to be encountered with clarity and intimacy as photography moves beyond image and into object and space.

L. Mikelle Standbridge’s work remains consistent with the original presentation, though only two of her long Scroll-ingphotographic works are shown here. Suspended in space, the pieces maintain a quiet dialogue with gravity, gesture, and material transformation.

Roberta Toscano’s work shifts dramatically in context. At Casa Regis, five CT-scan images were displayed on top of a medical light box in a darkened room. At El Nido, a single work rests in natural light upon an old black mirrored desk. In this setting, reflections and daylight evoke something closer to stellar galaxies, inviting contemplation of consciousness and inner space through a distinctly California light.

Silvia Gaffurini presents a different work than in the Italian exhibition: The Eight Lamp (2021–2024), a single transparent and embossed photographic page bound within a book and placed upon a stack of volumes, where photography becomes both page and object. Olga Caldas similarly approaches photography as a tactile artifact, presenting a handmade photobook as sculptural form.

Fabiola Ubani exhibits a series of five photographic glass works arranged along a shelf, where image and glass merge in a delicate balance between fragility and permanence.

Bennie Flores Ansell, whose works at Casa Regis appeared in multiple configurations, presents here one series titled Film Sprockets Timelines (2016–2017). In Italy the works rested along a windowsill; at El Nido they hang from the wall, emphasizing the structural qualities of photographic material.

Oona Hyland presents one of her ceramic pitchers incorporating photographic imagery, drawn from a larger group of five shown at Casa Regis. The vessel merges clay and image, transforming photography into a sculptural and quietly domestic form.

Dawn Surratt contributes two new works that exist purely as objects—one incorporating the delicate mechanism of a watch piece, and another an assemblage constructed from a small box. In both works, photography becomes part of an intimate constellation of materials reflecting on time and memory.

The Los Angeles presentation offers a concentrated encounter with these artists’ investigations. Seen together, the works invite viewers to consider the subtle shifts between photograph as image, photograph as object, and photograph as sculpture.

Part homage to photography’s experimental history and part update reflecting what the medium has become, the exhibition reveals photography as something still in motion—no longer confined to the flatness of the wall, but unfolding through materials, objects, and space.

At El Nido, this focused presentation invites viewers to look closely and reconsider the photographic image—where light, form, and material quietly converge.