Season 23 Exhibitions

How does the photographic moment relate to what persists—in time, in meaning, in us?

Photography holds two things at once: the instant, and what endures beyond it.

Marcus Aurelius wrote of contemplating "the sweep of time" as a way to ease the weight of present concerns—to find orientation not in the turbulence of the moment, but in the longer arcs of history, memory, and continuity. The Sweep of Time: Beyond the Horizon took that idea as its premise and invited lens-based artists to share works that explore it.

The horizon here is not a boundary. It is an opening—a threshold between what is immediate and what persists, between the visible and what lies just beyond seeing. Works considered by our jury and ultimately included in this exhibition may address any subject, era, or form; what matters is not the topic but the orientation—a quality of expanded vision in which the image reaches past its own moment, holding the immediate and the enduring in the same frame. Such images resist the reactive pull of the present and invite the viewer to slow down, look further, and reconsider their own place within the unfolding of time.

The Sweep of Time: Beyond the Horizon is presented as part of the 2026 FotoFocus Biennial, The Long View. In a moment of persistent turbulence, this exhibition affirms art's role as a stabilizing force—one that fosters clarity, patience, and a deeper sense of orientation within time.

Support for this exhibition was provided by FotoFocus.

For this exhibit 104 artists submitted 374 works from 27 states and 4 countries, including Canada, England, Israel, and the United States. Fifteen works by the following 10 artists from 7 states were selected by a blind jury process for presentation in the gallery and the Manifest Exhibition Annual publication.

We are pleased to present works by:

Dylan Bannister
Rock Hill, South Carolina

Margaret Day
Ouaquaga, New York

Margo Geddes
Missoula, Montana

Carol Henry
Springfield, Kentucky

Patricia Howard
Louisville, Colorado

Chuck Miller
Green Island, New York

Birgit Rudel
Glendale, California

PJ Sturdevant
Cincinnati, Ohio

Werner Sun
Ithaca, New York

Crystal Tursich
Blacklick, Ohio

A FotoFocus Biennial
Participating Venue Exhibit

Patrick D. Wilson is an Associate Professor of Sculpture at Western Michigan University's Frostic School of Art. He holds a BA from Gustavus Adolphus College and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he later served on the visiting faculty. Wilson's multidisciplinary practice employs sculpture, photography, and digital media to investigate urban development, futurism, and the relationship between technological and social change.

Wilson has exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions and venues including the Treasure Hill Artist Village in Taipei, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, SFMOMA Artists Gallery, the Sharjah Art Museum in the UAE, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, NASA Ames Research Center, and the Stanford Art Gallery. He has permanent public works at the University of Minnesota Crookston, the Mall of America, and Buffalo Creek Art Center in Nevada.

Wilson's work is grounded in place-based research. In 2012, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to China. He has been an artist in residence at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency, the Buffalo Creek Art Center in Nevada, Penland School of Craft in North Carolina, Agder Kunstsenter in Norway, and Treasure Hill Artist Village in Taiwan.

Of his work Wilson states, in part:

Unbuilt Terrain is a selection of work spanning more than a decade of investigation at the intersection of photography, sculpture, and digital mediation. During this time, I have employed place-based photographic research, 3D modeling, virtual reality, digital rendering, and sculptural fabrication processes to transform photographic information into physical form. Together, these media function not simply as tools of representation, but as a framework for imagining experiences of place and understanding the physical, social, and political forces shaping the spaces that surround us.

This exhibition was assembled from among 188 proposals submitted for Manifest’s 23rd season. Solo and two-person exhibitions are selected through Manifest’s curatorial review process, led by the Executive Director and Chief Curator, and developed in collaboration with the exhibition coordinator.

Jerry Birchfield (b. 1985) lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned a BFA in Photography from the Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA from Cornell University. He is an artist, a Full-Time Lecturer in photography at Case Western Reserve University, and the founder of Field Studio.

Birchfield is a recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, a think[box] Faculty Fellowship from CWRU, and an Artist Forward Fund award from SPACES. Through Field Studio, he photographed exhibitions for the FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art catalogs and completed a large-scale photography project for inclusion in Art in Nature: Rowdy Meadow Sculpture Park published earlier this year.

Solo exhibitions include A Pale, A Post, A Boundary at Devening Projects in Chicago; Jerry Birchfield: Asleep in the Dust at the Akron Art Museum; and Stagger When Seeing Visions organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art at the Transformer Station. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Abattoir, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, 2731 Prospect, Reinberger Gallery, and SPACES in Cleveland; Riffe Gallery and ROYGBIV in Columbus; the Print Center in Philadelphia; Schema Projects and Foley Gallery in New York; and the Los Angeles Center of Photography. His work is included in the collections of the Akron Art Museum, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland Museum of Art, CWRU Putnam Collection, and University Hospitals and has appeared in the Akron Beacon Journal, The Columbus Dispatch, Der Greif, I Like Your Work, and The Plain Dealer.

Of his work Birchfield states, in part:

Back and fill is a term that refers to a series of small movements used to maneuver a sailboat through a narrow area. It is also an idiom that refers to the act of reneging on a previous statement or promise. The phrase is appropriate here for describing both the production and operation of my work, as each depends on a series of small oscillating shifts.

I use a variety of techniques, materials and processes including film and digital photography, darkroom processes, inkjet printing, print making, drawing, sculpture, installation, books, and collaborative performance. Materials are swept up, poured out, assembled, rearranged, staged, photographed, traced, cut, encased, built up, torn down, stripped back, excavated from and reabsorbed by detritus, leftovers and castoffs generated by events within the studio. Though the works move across materials and processes, they remain deeply rooted in a concern for the multilayered operation of images and the roles of the components that make them perceptible including representation, materiality, and spectatorship.

Works invite viewers to trace the source of their origin and the processes by which they were made, purporting that this mental tracing is as pertinent as the image-objects themselves. As the work maneuvers through narrow spaces and reneges on previous statements, sense must be made of its parts, allowing positions of understanding to be acknowledged then reaffirmed or changed.

This exhibition was assembled from among 188 proposals submitted for Manifest’s 23rd season. Solo and two-person exhibitions are selected through Manifest’s curatorial review process, led by the Executive Director and Chief Curator, and developed in collaboration with the exhibition coordinator.

Paho Mann was born in 1978 on his parents' homestead near Snowflake, Arizona. In 1992 he moved with his family to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where in 2001 he received a BFA from the University of New Mexico. He received his MFA from Arizona State University in 2007. Currently, Mann lives and works in Dallas, Texas, where he is a Professor of Studio Art at the University of North Texas. Paho Mann's work is represented by Galleri Urbane in Dallas, TX.

Mann has had work included in exhibitions at the Arizona State University Art Museum (Tempe, AZ), Tucson Museum of Art (Tucson, AZ), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), and the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, PA), among others. His work is included in the collections of the Tucson Museum of Art, the Museum at Texas Tech University, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and the City of Phoenix Public Art Program.

Of his work Mann states, in part:

My work investigates the evolving relationships between photography, technology, and perception. I present large-scale photographic prints that emerge from a dialogue between traditional still-life arrangements and the unseen mechanisms of computer vision. The resulting images are carefully constructed tableaus of broken cameras, outdated consumer electronics, flowers, and digitally rendered objects, photographed extensively and transformed into 3D models through photogrammetry software. During this process, I extract and manipulate the ephemeral data - intermediate visualizations that software uses to calculate depth and form - before they are discarded. Through this process, the photographs explore not only the fluid boundary between human and machine vision but also the instability of representation in a time of rapid technological change...

The work presents photography as an evolving language - one that not only records but also interprets, distorts, and speculates - offering viewers a space to reflect on their own relationship to technology, image-making, and the constructed realities we inhabit.

This exhibition was assembled from among 188 proposals submitted for Manifest’s 23rd season. Solo and two-person exhibitions are selected through Manifest’s curatorial review process, led by the Executive Director and Chief Curator, and developed in collaboration with the exhibition coordinator.

Ricardo Barros is a photographer, writer, curator, and filmmaker. His works are in the permanent collections of eleven museums, including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Art of São Paulo, and the Museum of Image and Sound, also in São Paulo, Brazil. In 2004, Barros published Facing Sculpture: A Portfolio of Portraits, Sculpture and Related Ideas, a book of portraiture that also addresses contemporary sculpture. Magdalena Abakanowicz, one of the sculptors portrayed, called it "a work beyond categories." He was awarded a Fellowship in Photography by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts in 1984 and 2021. He also received The Present Tense Prize in 2024 from ArtsWorcester for "work that shows new practices, artistic risk-taking, and excellence in execution." Ricardo Barros lives in Fitchburg, Massachusetts.

Of his work Barros states:

A flattened 360-degree panorama is like a prism that refracts light. We can't actually see sunlight. We see what the sunlight illuminates. But if you hold a prism to the sunlight, it refracts and separates the different wavelengths. We see different colors. And so it is with these photographs. They refract unseen observations. Through distorted topography and a compressed sense of time, they gift insight into things we thought we already knew.

This exhibition was assembled from among 188 proposals submitted for Manifest’s 23rd season. Solo and two-person exhibitions are selected through Manifest’s curatorial review process, led by the Executive Director and Chief Curator, and developed in collaboration with the exhibition coordinator.