Rachel Jump

Rachel Jump's black and white work explores themes addressing ideas of home, belonging, memory, and absence, and have been exhibited throughout the United States. Rachel is represented by Alibi Fine Art in Chicago, IL, and had her first major solo exhibition in November of 2015. She graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA PH’14), where she received the Harry Koorejian Memorial Scholarship in 2013 and the Haining Family Scholarship in 2012. Her photographs are a part of the RISD Museum Special Collections, where she was also a visiting artist in conjunction with the exhibition, America in View: Landscape Photography 1865 to Now, in 2012. Rachel has taught at the Nantucket Island School of Design and the Arts and Maine Media Workshops + College and spent the last year working as a studio assistant for the photographer, Arno Rafael Minkkinen. Rachel lives and works in the Chicago area.

Rachel's solo exhibition, Origins, is currently open until December 24, 2015 at Alibi Fine Art in Chicago, IL. She will be giving an artist talk in conjunction with the exhibition on December 19, 2015 from 4:00-5:00pm. Check it out if you are in the area!

Artist Statement: Origins 

The core of my photographic practice stems from a place of pure empathy- a desire to share my story within the collective human experience. My visual trajectory has always centered on the disparate nature of my own family, and my desire to reconnect us.

For most of my childhood our lives were scattered over countless households. My disparate memories of these places merely composed a fragmented idea of home. Later in life I began to question how my identity was shaped without a point of origin. Photography provided a way in which I could eternalize these fleeting moments, a fiction entangled by my truth. As a way to cope with these feelings of isolation, I created a narrative hoping to connect these places and reunite my family. Through this shared experience, my family and I appear to search for one another within the various environments that divided us. As a result of our efforts to find solace and intimacy, I conjured a myth of a home; a sanctuary where my loved ones and I could finally belong.

My photographs are relics of loss; traces of a family that I tried to piece back together.

Acacia Johnson

Acacia Johnson is a photographer and artist from Alaska. Her photographic process can be described as expeditionary in nature, exploring her profound connection to the landscapes of the Far North in Alaska, Scandinavia, Iceland, and beyond.

Acacia has worked as a photojournalist in Norway and has exhibited her work internationally. Her work is also included in collections at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum and the Smithsonian Museum of American History. She holds a BFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design and is the recent recipient of a Fulbright Student Award to pursue a photo project in the Canadian Arctic for the 2014-15 academic year. She will be working as an expedition guide in Greenland and the Canadian Arctic this summer. 

Origins Statement

These images are a return to the boreal landscape of Alaska, my childhood home. In the Far North, a place not governed by conventions of light or time, hours pass in the movement of the stars, in the rush of the sea ice adrift in the tide. Together with my family, I roam this land, seeking the places and occurrences that illustrate the wondrousness I perceived as a child. Like birds and all things blessed with flight, the landscape escapes the bounds of the earth, its profound subtleties happening inside of us as much as they are happening outside. Through my camera, I construct a personal mythology for my family, in which the landscape serves as a gateway to a numinous realm, and we stand, awestruck yet at home, at the border.