Hot Sheet 2024
Expanding the Boundaries of Photography
The annual Hot Sheet exhibition returns in 2024 with a fresh perspective on the evolving landscape of contemporary photography. This year's show challenges traditional notions of photography as a two-dimensional medium, showcasing works that blur the line between image and object. Featuring a selection of artists whose work transcends conventional photography, Hot Sheet 2024 delves into how light, texture, and form can be molded to explore the physicality of the photograph. With pieces ranging from a reflection of water transposed onto aluminum to a rainbow mathematically reimagined and captured through heat on stainless steel, the exhibition pushes the limits of how photography is understood and experienced.
“This year, we wanted to explore the fluidity of photography, not just as a way of capturing moments, but as something that transforms the image into a material object,” the exhibition's curators explain. “The works selected for Hot Sheet 2024 challenge the conventional view of photography as merely a window onto the world. These artists experiment with natural elements such as light and water, as well as digital manipulation, to expose the tension between the instantaneous nature of photography and the ever-changing beauty of the natural world. Through their deconstruction and reconfiguration of the medium, these works reveal photography as something far more dynamic and multi-dimensional.”
A key influence for this year's theme comes from artist Amy Hui Li and her piece Soaked in Stardust, which serves as a catalyst for the 2024 exhibition. Her work, an explosive blend of fibers and blue paint, evokes the feeling of a damaged film negative, simultaneously capturing a moment of destruction and transformation. “Amy’s piece takes photography far beyond its traditional boundaries,” the curators add. “Her three-dimensional paintings, with textiles that evoke burning film, ask us to rethink how photography interacts with space and the viewer. The shift from two-dimensional image to sculptural object in her work set the tone for the entire exhibition.”
With this shift in perspective, Hot Sheet 2024 questions the viewer's role and interaction with photography. Instead of remaining a flat, confined moment in time, the photograph becomes tactile and immersive, drawing the viewer into an altered experience. The curators continue, “We wanted to dig deeper into our relationship with photography as an object. By distorting and manipulating the medium, the artists in this show invite us to interact with the photograph in new ways, whether through texture, layering, or reshaping the form. Photography is no longer just a tool to capture an image—it becomes the starting point for something entirely new.”
Hot Sheet 2024 features a diverse group of artists who explore these themes, including Daniel Arteaga, Katie Eleanor, Tom Faber, Sotiris Gonis, Amy Hui Li, Anna Ill, Isabel Merchante, Victor Nyberg, Aastha Patel, and Amber Toplisek. Together, their works offer a compelling reimagining of what photography can be in both the physical and digital age.
Artists
