LOCUS OF A GESTURE

Filter Photo is pleased to present Locus of a Gesture, a three-person exhibition curated by Kristie Kahns, featuring work by David Ondrik, Dakota Mace, and Daniel Hojnacki.

Foregoing the camera for a more intuitive approach to the medium, these artists create images that traverse the edge between agency and automatism, exploring the active gesture and the receptive surface as essential elements. From their embodied practices, a photographic disclosure unfolds—one that is not an indexical imprint, a representation, or a copy but an analogy, as cultural theorist Kaja Silverman has argued. 

In this way, the cameraless photographs of Hojnacki, Mace, and Ondrik reside at the locus of human perception, combining the action of light and a sublime sense of materiality to forestall what Silverman calls the miracle of analogy—the affective eruption of the past into the present. Drawing from multivalent sources of memory—from family to land to respiration—these artists use photography as a method for dealing with grief, transmitting ancestral knowledge, or translating the pulse and rhythms of the body.

Using the historical printmaking technique of cliché-verre, Daniel Hojnacki translates the ephemeral and subconscious patterns of daily life into visible records of suspension, as evidenced in his triptych of Rain Drawings (2022). In his Body Language series (2022–2026) consisting of twenty-six unique gelatin silver prints—a subtle nod to the letters of the alphabet—he evokes the gestural language of Surrealist automatism by drawing delicate, meditative traces onto the volatile glass substrate covered in smoke soot.

Dakota Mace invokes Diné cosmology in her diptych Náhookǫs Bikǫʼ II (2022), using the chemigram process to create painterly abstractions of a night sky pierced by beadwork of symbolic designs found in Diné history and material culture. In the Navajo language, Náhookǫs Bikǫʼ translates to “Central Fire,” signifying a focal point around which the constellations of the night sky revolve, bestowing navigation, timekeeping, and mythologies since time immemorial. By working with a silver-laden emulsion, Mace tethers each unique print in Náhookǫs Bikǫʼ II to the traditions of Navajo silversmithing, revealing a synthesis of concept, material, and ancestral knowledge.

In his series Looks Like Nothing (2022–2025), David Ondrik uses unconventional development techniques to coax a palette of violets and ochres out of the gelatin silver paper, subsequently collaged and stitched together to form soft shapes blooming from the dark surface. Part of an ongoing body of work, Ondrik’s chemigrams grapple with themes of loneliness, the distressing pendulum between terminal illness and compassionate care, and the solastalgia of environmental disaster. The evidence of abrasion and the vigorous application of chemistry make the weight of these themes visible, while the urgency of the sutures suggest an attempt to mend the consuming grief.

Kaja Silverman states that photography is the world’s primary way of revealing itself to us, and the works in Locus of a Gesture are emblematic of that declaration. In these works, the photosensitive surface becomes a site of haptic mediations, possessing a latent alchemy which, like the surface of a pond, registers the emergence of memories or patterns—in the land, the cosmos, the body, even the subconscious. While the dominant history of photography presents the fixed, representational image, these cameraless works challenge us to read photographic abstraction anew: as emanations of a revelatory language of gestures.

About the Artists & Curator

David Ondrik works primarily with analogue film processes, alternative printing techniques, and abstraction to examine photography’s capacity for reflection and contemplation. His artwork is held by the New Mexico Museum of Art, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, and multiple New Mexico public art collections. His work has been included in publications including Photography: A 21st Century Practice by Marc Chen and Chelsea Shannon, Undermining by Lucy Lippard, and Photography: New Mexico by Thomas F. Barrow and Kristin Barendsen. He has a BFA in Studio Art from the University of New Mexico and an MFA in Studio Art from Indiana University, where he is a Senior Lecturer in Photography.

Dakota Mace (Diné) is an interdisciplinary artist who focuses on translating the language of Diné history and beliefs. Mace received her MA and MFA degrees in Photography and Textile Design at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her BFA in Photography from the Institute of American Indian Arts. As a Diné (Navajo) artist, her work draws from the history of her Diné heritage, exploring the themes of family lineage, community, and identity through alternative photography techniques, weaving, beadwork, and papermaking. She is a recipient of numerous awards, and her work is in the collections of the Library of Congress, Forge Project Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art among other public collections. She is represented by Higher Pictures in New York City, and she lives in Madison, WI.

Daniel Hojnacki uses experimental techniques in photography to investigate the quietness of being an observer within the world, creating work that explores the importance of materiality in the image-making process. Daniel seeks out ways of recording the movement of the body and natural world, trusting chance happenings within photography to capture the subtle and fleeting textural gestures around us. Daniel received his MFA from the University of New Mexico in 2022, and he is a recipient of the Penumbra Foundation Workspace Artist-In-Residence, The Patrick Nagatani Photography Scholarship, The Phyllis Muth Arts Award, among other honors. He has exhibited work at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, University of New Mexico Art Museum, and the Chicago Cultural Center.  His work has been featured in Aint-Bad, Pamplemousse Magazine and Southwest Contemporary Magazine. He is represented by 203 Fine Art in Taos, NM, and he currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Kristie Kahns works in the photographic field as an educator, image-maker, writer, and independent researcher, based in Chicago. Her interests include contemporary approaches to photographic materiality, and the pedagogy of analogue and historical processes. Her writing has been published by Sixty Inches From Center, Lenscratch, and Bridge Chicago magazine. She is a recipient of the 2025 Elaine Ling Research Fellowship from The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University. She received an MA in Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and holds a BA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago.