EMBEDDED GESTURES

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

Since its inception, the medium of photography has emerged as an invitation to observe the subtle alchemies in the natural world and within ourselves. Through such observations, some of the earliest photographic objects were made not with the apparatus of the camera but simply through the action of light and a sensitized surface. Nearly two hundred years after the invention of photography, as the field has fractured and transformed, artists continue to investigate photosensitive materials through camera-less interventions.

Embedded Gestures presents the work of three artists that utilize experimental and historical techniques to elicit a new lexicon of contemporary photography. Foregoing the camera for a more intuitive approach to the medium, David Ondrik, Dakota Mace, and Daniel Hojnacki create images that explore painterly abstraction and encoded gestures as a method for dealing with grief, transmitting ancestral knowledge, or suspending cycles of precipitation.

In his series Inheritance, 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. The evidence of abrasion and urgency of the sutures suggest a consuming grief that is impossible to mend. 

Dakota Mace explores Diné epistemology and spirituality by using the chemigram process to create abstractions of symbolic designs found in Diné history and material culture. By working with an emulsion imbued with silver, Mace tethers each unique print in her series Béésh Łigaii directly to the traditions of Navajo silversmithing, revealing a remarkable synthesis of concept, material, and ancestral memory.

Using the historical printmaking technique of cliché-verre, Daniel Hojnacki records the ephemeral and subconscious patterns of daily life, eloquently seen in his triptych of Rain Drawings. In his Body Language series consisting of 26 unique silver gelatin prints—a subtle nod to the letters of the alphabet—he evokes the gestural language of Surrealist automatism by drawing upon the volatile glass substrate covered in smoke soot with delicate, meditative traces.

In these works, the emphasis on materiality challenges common conceptions of a photograph, and these artists find new possibilities in the qualities of abstraction. The photosensitive surface of gelatin silver paper becomes a site of haptic mediations, possessing a latent alchemy to convey personal narratives through an encoded language. While the dominant history of photography presents the fixed, representational image, these camera-less works, following in the trails of generations of experimental practitioners, foreground the ephemerality of the medium and its tenuous relationship to memory.

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 Bruce Silverstein Gallery 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.