September 26 - November 14, 2026
Reception: Saturday, September 26 from 3-5 PM
Hannah Sloan Curatorial & Advisory
5613 San Vicente Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90019
Vanessa Woods, Form Unmoored 1, 2023, silver gelatin print, 14 x 11 inches
Eightfold / Curated by Katie Shapiro
September 26 – November 14, 2026
Presented in the front gallery is Eightfold, a selection of small works curated by Katie Shapiro from her critique group of eight women artists whose practices meet at the intersection of photography, materiality, and three-dimensional form. Through sculpture, installation, and object-based work, the group asks how photography can extend beyond the flat image to become a physical, spatial, or perceptual experience. Laura Plageman layers photographs to render landscape as unsettled and resistant to a single view; Vanessa Woods builds disorienting reconstructions from photographic collage and sculptural objects; Sophia Chai collapses space through the camera's optics, drawing and painting the corner of her studio; Brea Souders blends digital phenomena with physical objects to reveal how we see and relate to images; Janna Ireland turns to analog darkroom manipulation of familial archives to reconsider history; Paula McCartney moves between photography, ceramics, and sculpture to explore presence and absence; and Aimée Beaubien presses at the limits of photographic experience through immersive installation. Together with Shapiro, they share a commitment to reimagining how photography can occupy space and unearth new kinds of meaning.
Press inquiries can be directed to Diana Fitzgibbon at diana@hannahsloan.com.
/ About
Aimée Beaubien is a Chicago-based artist whose work reorganizes photographic experience through immersive installations, collage, and artists’ books. Her practice explores networks of meaning between the real and the ideal, often using photography to think through memory, association, and perception. In Bundle, Stack, Leave, Aimée Beaubien brings leaves, sticks, photographs, paracord and bioplastic into a work about preservation and change. Leaves gathered from her mother’s garden are encased in bioplastic while their natural deterioration continues within. Photographs offer another form of preservation, allowing the image to endure even as the original material disappears. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions including SF Camerawork, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Houston Center for Photography, and the UCR Museum of Photography. She is Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has taught since 1997.
Sophia Chai is a Rochester, Minnesota-based artist whose practice explores photography through light, space, optics, and perception. Working with an analog view camera and minimal materials, she constructs abstract compositions that move between drawing, painting, and three-dimensional space. Her recent work brings language into that investigation through Hangul, mapping the spatial logic of Korean vowels onto the studio. Chai treats the studio as both an optical chamber and a kind of mouth-space, where seeing, language, and physical space collapse and reassemble through light. Chai’s work has been exhibited at venues including Klaus Gallery, Luhring Augustine, A.I.R. Gallery, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. She is a 2024 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow, and her work is held in the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center, the Microsoft Art Collection, and Light Work.
Janna Ireland is a Los Angeles-based artist and assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Occidental College. Her work often examines architecture, history, memory, and the ways images shape our understanding of place and identity. Ireland is widely known for her ongoing photographic study of structures designed by architect Paul R. Williams. Her 2020 monograph, Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View, brought together 250 photographs from the project and was republished with additional images in 2026. Her mid-career survey, Janna Ireland: True Story Index, was presented by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara in 2024 and will travel to the Amon Carter Museum in 2027. Her work is held in the permanent collections of institutions including LACMA, SFMOMA, the California African American Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago.
Paula McCartney is a Minneapolis-based artist whose practice spans photography, photo-based artist books, and ceramics. Her work often grows from collaborations with the natural world, with particular attention to light, environment, and the psychological dimensions of motherhood. In Nesting, McCartney pairs a photograph of cliff swallow nest remains at Badlands National Park with a hand-built ceramic vessel. Constructed one ball of clay at a time over the course of a studio day, the vessel extends the act of looking into a physical process of contemplation and making. McCartney’s work has been exhibited at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Her artist books are held in collections including the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art, the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University, and the Getty Research Institute.
Laura Plageman is an Oakland-based artist whose photographic practice explores transformation, perception, and our relationship to the natural world. Working across digital and physical processes, she reshapes photographs into layered images that move between representation and abstraction. Plageman photographs landscapes over time and from multiple vantage points, then brings those images back into the studio to be layered, reworked, and recombined. Her process reflects an interest in how both landscapes and photographs remain in flux, shaped by movement, memory, natural forces, and human intervention. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the de Young Museum, the Houston Center for Photography, and the Bolinas Museum. Her photographs are also held in LACMA’s permanent collection.
Katie Shapiro, Curator and exhibiting artist. In Katie Shapiro’s small inkjet prints, a crescent moon reappears against fields of cranberry, green, peach, gray and black. Changes in color and contrast make the familiar form appear luminous, faint or almost hidden, inviting a closer look at how an image comes into view. Shapiro works across photography and sculpture to give form to experiences that resist visibility or language. Her attention to the intangible connects these quiet lunar images with Eightfold’s broader exploration of photography as a physical and perceptual experience.
Brea Souders is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work explores what is lost and what persists as images move through technological, natural, and personal histories. She is interested in how time, algorithms, weather, memory, and acts of looking can reshape both images and the people connected to them.In Eightfold, Souders presents works from her Vistas series, which combine pigment prints with hand-applied watercolor. The works reflect her interest in control and uncertainty, allowing the image to shift through both photographic and painterly processes. Souders is the author of Another Online Pervert and Eleven Years, with a forthcoming book, Blue Women, to be published by TBW Books in fall 2026. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including Foam Museum, Centre Photographique Rouen Normandie, and PhMuseum. She is also the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a National Arts Club Fellowship, and a Baxter St. at CCNY Residency.
Vanessa Woods is a San Francisco Bay Area artist working across photography, collage, sculpture, and installation. Her practice examines identity, motherhood, and gender, often focusing on the contradictions and shifting states that shape maternal experience. In Eightfold, Woods presents works that push photography into a more physical and sculptural space. Her images and objects are continually remixed and reconstructed, reflecting a body and identity in flux. Woods has exhibited at institutions including Filter Space, the Walker Art Center, and the Institute of Contemporary Art San Jose. She has participated in residencies at MacDowell, Djerassi, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Headlands Center for the Arts. Her first monograph, M/Other, will be released by Luhz Press in Spring 2027.
