Artist Talk w/ Ebony Lewis & Bobby Miller

Water and Light
Treading Water & Exposed to Joy — Two Bodies of Work by Arthur Fields

Water and light are the elements of this exhibition — not as metaphors first, but as literal photographic materials. Every image here was made through submersion or exposure, and in both bodies of work, that physical process doubles as the emotional one.

Treading Water is the struggle to stay afloat. The act of remaining submerged, of pushing against something that never lets up, becomes a picture of endurance — the quiet, unglamorous labor of holding your head above water when the water itself is the point.

Exposed to Joy is the risk of letting the light in. Each cyanotype portrait requires direct exposure to UV light to develop — nothing hidden, nothing held back. The same is true of the joy pictured in these faces: real happiness, caught without performance, requires a kind of openness that is its own small act of courage.

Read in sequence, the two titles trace a single arc: submersion, then exposure. Enduring, then opening up. The photographic action and the emotional action are not separate — they are the same gesture, seen twice.

This is the exhibition's whole claim: that staying afloat and letting the light in are not opposites, but two moments in the same act of survival.
— Arthur Fields