Unique silver gelatin print / 30 x 40 in / 2022
Bleached silver gelatin print, smoke soot monotype / 20” x 24” / 2025
Unique silver gelatin print / 30 x 40 in / 2022
Weathering, To Form More Time contemplates the temporality of the body and its intrinsic interconnectedness with the cosmic landscape. Photographic impressions of the artist’s breath are suspended in frost, fingerprints are encased in layers of smoke soot, preserving traces of presence and touch. These encapsulated fleeting gestures are paired with a selection of collaged images of distant planets and moons coupled with found poetry redacted from a vintage book on planetary science.
The photographs exhibited were created using a traditional analog photographic darkroom, light is manipulated and harnessed to capture the most nuanced traces left behind. Several photographs have been re-exposed to fire light with a candle flame through a technique called solarization. A transformation in tones and shifting textures is caused by the natural chemical reaction of fire to light sensitive paper. Using a 19th Century printing method called cliché-verre, soot is gathered upon glass from the same flame used to layer richly deep black monotypes atop the photographic prints.
Microscopic residues of the body begin to mimic the hardened textures of distant planets, while words—redacted from scientific research and speculation—come to imitate the aging and weathering of our own bodies, inviting for quiet reflections on the brevity of mortality and the unseen passages of time.
Weathering, To Form More Time contributes to critical dialogues around environmental precarity, bodily vulnerability and humanity’s evolving perception of time and scale. Together, the works form a meditation on presence, transformation, and endurance, where the smallest traces of the body are held in tension with the immeasurable scale of the cosmos. This exhibition offers a space to contemplate impermanence and interdependence, and consider how fleeting gestures, natural processes, and celestial cycles are deeply entwined.
Daniel Hojnacki (b.1989) 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 a BA from Columbia College Chicago 2011. He is a recipient of the Penumbra Foundation Workspace Artist-In-Residence, LATITUDE Residency, 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. He currently lives and works in Chicago, IL. where he is a collections assistant with the THOMA Foundation.