Three hundred miles. It’s an arbitrary distance, a circle drawn on a map with Pittsburgh at its center, catching Detroit and Rochester while excluding New York and Chicago. In Silver Eye Center for Photography’s Radial Survey, that arbitrary boundary becomes a methodological choice with distinct implications. By limiting geography, the biennial expands possibilities for what conversations become audible when the usual coastal voices aren’t drowning everyone else out. This year’s Radial Survey Vol. 4 features artists who span continents, yet they share the Rust Belt’s industrial memory, its histories of extraction and labor, its complex relationship to progress and decline. The radius isn’t about provincialism; it’s about creating the conditions for a different kind of artistic perspective to emerge.
The fourth volume of Silver Eye Center for Photography’s Radial Survey, their signature event, which arrived this fall as a testament to the vitality of artistic practice beyond the usual coastal centers. Since its launch in 2019, the biennial exhibition has showcased photographers working within three hundred miles of Pittsburgh, amplifying voices outside New York and Chicago. This year’s iteration expands those conversations further, introducing fresh perspectives and approaches that respond to today’s artistic landscape and our shared sociopolitical moment. Throughout the exhibition, there is a palpable emphasis on how past and present blend, with artists engaging historical materials and contemporary technologies in conversation.
The curatorial process itself reflects a commitment to breaking down hierarchies. For this volume, co-curators Helen Trompeteler and Leo Hsu continued the peer-to-peer nomination system introduced in Volume 3: Artists from the previous edition suggest candidates, leading to in-studio visits and eventual selection. This collaborative and iterative process ensures continuous dialogue between editions while uncovering artists who might otherwise remain unknown.
The six artists featured embody the survey’s central themes: fluidity of form and an embrace of ambiguity. Unframed pieces seem alive, lifting off the wall, thinking outside the frame. Ian John Solomon, from Detroit, opens with a self-portrait before using the natural world to explore lived histories, particularly confronting the dark ironies of solar fields and “improvements” built at the expense of marginalized communities, especially Black ones. He works with mixed media that is rooted in activism as seen through the 3×3 steel-framed Polaroids and collages of the natural world.
Juan Orrantia, whose life has spanned Colombia, South Africa, and Rochester, loves to focus on gesture. In one striking piece, a red-framed photograph captures his hand with a butterfly. For Orrantia, color and collage work against racist classification of human life through a philosophy of color and its relation to race. “Color is the genie escaped from the bottle,” explains co-curator Trompeteler, is the title of Orrantia’s piece. Color represents races and their reclamation, breathing new life into the still-life form while conducting a study of colonization and imperialism. The still life form has its own fraught history of classification and limits. Orrantia seems to find hope in the simple things, simple acts become revolutionary.
Pittsburgh’s Christine Lorenz employs macro photography and tactile smaller displays, working in black and white, both framed and unframed. Her focus on salt from West Virginia explores salt labor and human experience, unearthing the unknown histories of natural materials, particularly their relationship to slave labor. The exhibition space allows for an understated presentation that is up to the viewer to decide if it enhances or diminishes the power of Lorenz’s historical excavations.
Amelia Burns creates digital collages via mobile application, noticeably mobile, with straight photography made dreamlike that explores the spaces we inhabit and the multitudes we contain; one piece speaking to many emotions. She uses her own photography to create the bits of collage, reappropriating her own art. Collage is known for being an analog craft and Burns tries to reimagine it in this digital age.
McNair Evans offers a catalog of Amtrak trips accumulated over ten years, a cloud of subjectivities exploring transitions, trains, and mobility—travel and manifest destiny. Made over a long time, pieces hang off the walls intentionally, creating an immersive experience. Passenger stories, written by travelers into Evans’ journal, frame the framed portraits and landscape photography, providing accessibility through the human face. The work appears on two displays, one public-facing to the street, increasing engagement opportunities for Pittsburgh residents.
SHAN Wallace combines photography and moving images in a nomadic practice. Working with analog video mixed with pre-digital tools, Wallace embraces “camera failures” and the space between mediums and pixels, exploring states of surveillance. Wallace reproduced and used “failed” images from a 1970s half-frame Olympus camera, pursuing authentic experience through shadow and light. She runs her photos through an analog video mixer, creating a transformation of image that feels fitting for the space. The work is curated to resemble a roll of film spread across the wall. The curation is set up in a way where you can walk through the room clockwise or counterclockwise in rotation, photos dissolving into abstraction. We knew little about Wallace’s work beforehand, which poses an unique internal pull: this opacity can, for some, enhance the sense of archaeological discovery, but for others, it can prevent deeper engagement with the work’s concepts.
The survey’s audience spans artists, educators, researchers, students, and local community members who deeply believe in art’s power to spark conversation, foster community, and exchange vital ideas. Silver Eye itself hosts four exhibitions a year in its main gallery, along with workshops, education programs, and collaborative initiatives, striving to be a hub for contemporary artists and the public. While Radial Survey is the organization’s signature biennial event, it exists in dialogue with all their exhibitions and programs, embodying a mission that uplifts underrepresented artists, advances innovative artistic practices, and builds connections locally, nationally, and internationally.
Image credit: Amelia Burns, SILVERLININGWORLD, 2025
