The Goldmark Cultural Center’s John H. Milde Gallery is proud to present “While We Are Here…”, a solo exhibition featuring photographic works by Kelly O’Briant.
The exhibition is on display in the Goldmark Cultural Center’s John H. Milde Gallery from 28 September to 30 October 2026.
The exhibition’s reception is on Saturday, 3 October 2026 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm. The reception is a great opportunity to view the exhibition, meet the artist, and learn about the artwork.
About the Exhibition
I make photographs on medium format film with a homemade pinhole camera and a Holga wide-angle pinhole camera. I often intentionally layer frames, images, locations and contexts. Beaches, clouds, marshes, rooms and bodies overlap. Color vibrates. Figures repeat, disappear and pass through one another. One frame isn’t necessarily finished before the next begins. Something from the previous exposure remains; another place enters it; a body passes through. Things that could not occupy the same space in the visible world become inseparable on the film.
This feels very much like the way I experience the world—how I walk through it, observe it, remember it, and connect one thing to another. We don’t experience our lives as a clean sequence of discrete frames. The person in front of us exists alongside someone absent. The space we occupy contains other places. A memory enters the present without asking permission. Relationships of vastly different durations can coexist with equal intensity in the mind. Chronology is not necessarily a measure of emotional weight.
I have long been drawn to the surreal, but I don’t think I understood how visceral it could be—how completely the layers of a life can overlap into something simultaneously nonsensical and more real than anything around it. These photographs come from inside that overlap. They aren’t about arriving on the other side. They are made from inside the middle.
The process is technologically simple and remarkably direct: no lens, no digital compositing, no post-production creating these collisions. Light passes through a tiny opening and strikes film. Time, movement, my decisions, and chance construct the image. I don’t see exactly what I have made while I am making it.
Long exposures record duration differently. What is still can remain clear while living bodies move, blur and sometimes nearly disappear. A crowded beach becomes a mass of anonymous figures; a single blurred person might be a stranger or someone I know intimately. For many years, I have worked primarily in ceramics, considering people through the traces of their presence in objects and spaces. In these photographs, the people are present, but remain similarly elusive
Distortion, blur, repetition and overlapping exposures don’t make these photographs feel less true to me. They feel truer to experience precisely because they don’t describe the visible world with optical precision. There is a frame, but there is freedom within it: structure and accident, intimacy and anonymity, clarity and blur. One thing ends while another is already beginning, and sometimes neither disappears completely.
These photographs are not quite documents of what the world looks like. They are a record of what it feels like to be fully inside it.
About the Artist
Kelly O’Briant is an artist working in ceramics and photography. A native of North Carolina, she studied ceramics and cultural anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and worked as a studio potter for nearly a decade before earning her MFA in ceramics from Arizona State University.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions including the Crocker Art Museum, American Museum of Ceramic Art, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Archie Bray Foundation, and Penland School of Craft. O’Briant’s residencies include the Archie Bray Foundation and Hambidge Center, as well as programs in Kristinestad, Finland; the International Ceramics Studio in Kecskemét, Hungary; and the Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China.
Named an Emerging Artist by the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) in 2015, O’Briant later completed a postdoctoral research fellowship in ceramic production methods and digital technologies at West Virginia University.
O’Briant is based in Texas, where she is Chair of the Art Department and Associate Professor of Ceramics at the University of Dallas.