Look Again by Elizabeth Converse

UNSEEN — LMF Gallery + Darkroom, Sierra Madre Curated by Richard S. Chow

Photography has always promised to show us what is real. UNSEEN asks a different question: what lives just beyond the frame, beneath the surface, inside the moment before the image settles into meaning? This is a show born of its moment. The six artists in UNSEEN did not turn away from turbulence — they turned toward it, and through it, discovering in varied photographic processes a way to offer what cannot quite be seen.

Erica Kelly Martin came to photography through geology, and it shows. Her series Ripple: Aftershock pulls images through layered, iterative distortion until they coil into fractal formations that suggest seismic readings, satellite imagery, and the eye of a storm. Color behaves as energy rather than description. These are not records of events. They are the visual wave that registers after collapse, documents of a world vibrating under pressure.

Karen Numme’s Red Among the Ruins is rooted in the destruction of Los Angeles — the tearing down of buildings both notable and otherwise — and the insistent emergence of new life within that devastation. Red leaves appear in each photograph as markers of regeneration, signaling growth amid loss. The imagery is intentionally non-specific; it could exist anywhere in America, reflecting what Numme calls a broader, shared condition of continual erasure and renewal.

Lori Pond made The Atlas of Chimerical States during the wildfires, placing foraged plants and found objects on light-sensitive paper to expose in the sun — working on expired 1975 Russian photo paper, painting objects with developer, fixer, and cyanotype solutions. Weather shaped every print. The resulting lumen prints are unfixed and will eventually fade, a reminder, as Pond writes, that nothing lasts forever. An art in conversation with impermanence, using her immediate surroundings as both subject and material.

Jonas Yip brings a different kind of layering — figures from past lives appearing and fading behind a veil, forms stacked and shifted in positive and negative until unexpected colors sing through. A fine art photographer and musician who left Silicon Valley to concentrate on smaller, more personal projects, Yip’s work in UNSEEN explores the interplay of the visible and the almost-gone, the ghost and the form that contains it.

Catherine Just’s work may be the most intimate in the show. Thirty-seven years sober, Just has spent her creative life translating internal landscapes — emotions, unspoken thoughts, the undercurrents of relationships — into what she calls visual poetry. Art, she says plainly, saved her life. Her darkroom collages tear identity from shadow and light, tracing what gets reshaped in the process of becoming. The act of creation, for Just, is a pathway to something larger than herself. Standing before her work, you feel that.

Richard S. Chow, who both curated the exhibition and contributed his own camera-less lumen prints, completes the conversation. His Present Tense series offers rich, layered compositions in which the photographic element recedes and the object itself — its texture, its tangible presence — becomes the subject. These are works that invite touch as much as sight, that ask you to slow down, to look again.

Together, these six artists do not simply depict the unseen. They make space for it — and remind us that, in a moment of collective instability, paying close attention is itself an act of courage.

UNSEEN runs through Saturday, April 4th at LMF Gallery + Darkroom, 55 North Baldwin Avenue, Sierra Madre.

Gallery hours: Wednesday through Saturday, 12:30 to 6pm, or by appointment.

Instagram: @THELMFLA — Works available at THELMFLA.ORG

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