SF Camerawork presents Forecast 2023, an annual juried survey exhibition, at Fort Mason Center For Arts & Culture (FMCAC). Each year SF Camerawork invites an esteemed jury of artists, curators, and critics to select and showcase the work of emerging image-makers, with an eye toward current movements, trends, and concerns in contemporary photography.

For 2023, San Francisco Bay Area artists Ashima Yadava and Minoosh Zomorodinia have selected the work of Mary Campbell, Harvey Castro, Amy Elkins, Shao-Feng Hsu (Juror’s Choice Award), Kei Ito, and Helia Pouyanfar from more than 180 entries from around the world. FORECAST 2023 is on view May 9, 2023 through August 5, 2023. SF Camerawork hosts an opening reception on Friday, May 12, 2023, 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. in Landmark Building A in FMCAC.

FORECAST 2023’s jury and SF Camerawork’s staff were impressed not just by the aesthetic quality of the selections but also by the breadth of this cohort’s subjects, which include archival interventions (Elkins), documents and interpretations of urgent geopolitical issues (Castro, Pouyanfar), innovative abstraction (Hsu, Ito), and even formalist whimsy (Campbell).

For 2023, SF Camerawork is proud to announce several increases in our scope and support for emerging artists through the FORECAST program, including $500 cash prizes for all artists and an increased Juror’s Choice prize for outstanding achievement at $1,500. 2023 is also the first year SF Camerawork releases an Honorable Mention list, whose work is viewable online concurrent with the gallery exhibit.

Shao-Feng Hsu, recipient of the 2023 Juror’s Choice Award, is a San Francisco-based artist whose photography practice focuses on the interactions between humans and aquatic environments. Hsu’s work explores how to make images that translate his physical experience with water, capturing the inexplicable but complex sensation of being below the water’s surface. Combining his lifelong swimming practice with his experimental process and discovery of breath photograms, his wondrous series “Night Swimming” expresses ideas about embodiment, identity, and the environment. Fundamentally, his work is a poetic exploration of what it means to look at photographs considering life’s essence: breath.

Mary Campbell is a San Francisco (SF) Bay Area-based artist who finds inspiration in the theatrics of everyday life through her whimsical perspective and oddball installation techniques combined with rigorous attention to color, form, and composition. Campbell is interested in the do-it-yourself homeowner manuals, magazine advertisements, and the loneliness of late-stage capitalism; seeing her found objects as props for performance. Silently steering our attention from photograph to object and back again, Campbell is interested in how we disguise our discarded objects with pattern-matching design tricks.

Harvey Castro is a multidisciplinary artist, visual storyteller, and documentary photographer based in the SF Bay Area. Representation is crucial to Castro’s work as a documentary photographer and immigrant of color. His work delves into the complex relationship between climate change and immigration, identity, diversity, and inclusion. In his project, “Los Olvidados, Guatemala,” Castro creates a poignant examination of the devastating destruction left by Hurricane Eta in November 2020 in the village of Queja, Guatemala. Castro documented the tragedy in Queja, looking at how natural disasters far too often leave marginalized communities behind. Through his profound photographs, he hopes to bring attention to these communities’ resilience and struggle and ensure they are not forgotten.

Amy Elkins is an SF Bay Area-based visual artist in photography, installation, and sculpture. She explores the complexities of identity and gender, including how they are impacted by systems of power: prisons, the military, and colonization. “A Place Where We Are In The Sun” uses the artists’ family archives, historical documents, and early Alta California maps to trace the land loss, assimilation, and resilience of Indigenous and Chicanx ancestors in Southern California. Through earnest and tender juxtapositions of natural, cultural, and archival memory, “A Place Where We Are In The Sun” is Elkins’ way of reconnecting her ancestors to the ever-changing land they once knew while offering an intimate counterpoint to the hardened enclosure of institutional archives.

Kei Ito is a Baltimore-based artist whose work addresses deep inter-generational connection and loss through experimental photography. The materials used to create Ito’s “Burning Away” are rooted in the generational trauma of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, which claimed many lives, including the artist’s grandfather. Ito found many stories of survivors treating burns with honey, cooking, and even motor oil due to the scarcity of essential medicine. By utilizing the same substances described in their accounts to heal the charred trauma desperately, these prints symbolize the memory of nuclear fire but also the disappearing voices of the survivors. Through his dynamic, painterly prints, Ito’s artwork offers temporal monuments to explore social issues, and memorialize those who were lost and continue to hurt.

Helia Pouyanfar is an SF Bay Area-based conceptual artist whose work investigates the permanently transient state of the refugee body and its negotiation and reconciliation with Place. She utilizes sculpture, installation, photography, and writing to manifest this transient state through architectural objects, images, and videos narrating the idea of Passage and the relationship between liminal spaces and transit. Born into a family of Kurdish descent in Iran, Pouyanfar moved to the US in 2014 after living as a refugee for three years. By referencing her personal history, she is able to humanize, edify, and narrate the deeply poetic and peculiar experience of forced exile.

SF Camerawork also proudly announces the FORECAST 2023 Honorable Mention list: Claire Dunn, Yi Hsuan Lai, Diane Meyer, Lorena Molina, Jason Reblando, and Brandon Tauszik. The exhibition jurors and SF Camerawork staff were impressed by the rigor and beauty expressed in the projects of these emerging artists, and we are excited to present a selection of their work online. This is the inaugural year of the Honorable Mention list as a part of FORECAST, and SF Camerawork is thrilled to extend the platform of this exhibition to these photographers.

FORECAST 2023 is on view in SF Camerawork’s gallery space in Building A from Tuesday, May 9, 2023 to Saturday, August 5, 2023. Gallery hours are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, 12:00 p.m. (Noon) to 6:00 p.m.; Friday, 12:00 p.m. (Noon) to 8:00 p.m.; and Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. The opening reception is Friday, May 12, 2023, 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

About the Jurors
Ashima Yadava is an India-born, conceptual documentary photographer and print-maker. With the camera as her conduit, Yadava believes in art as a means to social activism and reform. Her work is rooted in long-form stories with a focus on issues of gender equality, race, and social justice. Yadava works in digital and analog methods including large format and silkscreen. Her work has been featured in various publications around the world including National Geographic, Mother Jones, SF Chronicle, 6MOIS, and The Telegraph, among others. Yadava is a California Arts Council Fellow and the founder of Huq: I Seek No Favor. Her work can be seen at www.AshimaYadava.com.

Minoosh Zomorodinia, Iranian-born interdisciplinary artist, makes visible emotional and psychological reflections of her mind’s eye inspired by nature/environment. She employs walking as a catalyst to reference the power of technology as a colonial structure while negotiating land boundaries. Her “strollings” re-imagine relationships between land and technology, addressing transformations of memories into physical space. Zomorodinia serves with Southern Exposures’s Curatorial Council, Berkeley Art Center, SF Camerawork Program Committee, and is Co-Chair of Women Eco Artists Dialog. Her awards/residences / grants include Kala Media Fellowship, Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi Residency, Recology Artist Residency, Alternative Exposure Award, and California Art Council Grants. She exhibits locally/internationally including SF Asian Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Arts Commission, Nevada Museum of Art and is featured in the SF Chronicle, Hyperallergic, KQED, and numerous media outlets. She earned her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and MA/BA from Azad University, Tehran.

About SF Camerawork. SF Camerawork is a long-standing leader in the San Francisco arts milieu, committed to provoking discovery, experimentation, and exchange through exhibitions and experiences for all who value new ideas in photography. The organization was founded in 1974 by a collective of artists who welcomed experimental photography, unconventional techniques, and sociopolitical themes and who fostered a range of alternative styles and approaches. The essence of the founders’ vision remains at the core of SF Camerawork even as the organization has adapted to the changing scope of photography and surrounding cultural landscape.

For more than 45 years, SF Camerawork has provided a launching pad for many artists’ careers, supplying invaluable financial support, exhibition space, curation, and patronage. In its early years, SF Camerawork was the first organization in the SF Bay Area to host exhibitions and lectures by controversial but ultimately highly influential artists such as Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe, Susan Meiselas, and Joel-Peter Witkin. More recently, the organization has presented the first West Coast exhibitions for artists including John Chiara, Binh Danh, Erica Deeman, Jennifer Karady, Jason Lazurus, Chris McCaw, Wang Ning De, and Meghann Riepenhoff — artists who have emerged as leaders of a new generation gaining international prominence.

Free Admission