In Sweet Emulsion, each artist approaches photography as a material practice rather than a descriptive tool. Joanne Dugan works with silver-based analog processes to produce images that behave as objects—dense, tactile, and quietly sculptural—where light and chemistry accumulate into meditative form. Shaina Gates creates vibrant cameraless abstractions through folded photograms and direct exposure, allowing geometry, color, and chance to emerge from physical interaction with photosensitive surfaces. Anne Arden McDonald treats the darkroom as a site of alchemy, layering unconventional materials and chemical interventions to produce cosmic, painterly compositions that foreground process and instability. Liz Nielsen harnesses light itself as a generative force, producing unique chromogenic works and photograms whose saturated color and spatial ambiguity dissolve photographic reference. Mariah Robertson tests the limits of photographic materials, directly manipulating film and paper through chemical stress to create tracery patterns and fields of color. Julie Weber employs cameraless techniques and serial processes to reveal photography’s own conditions of making, producing works in which form, tone, and emulsion articulate themselves through repetition and restraint.
