Locus of a Gesture
Works by Daniel Hojnacki, Dakota Mace, and David Ondrik
Curated by Kristie Kahns
Filter Photo, Chicago, IL
June 26, 2026 to August 8, 2026
Locus of a Gesture presents work from three artists—Daniel Hojnacki, Dakota Mace, and David Ondrik—who utilize experimental and historical techniques to elicit a new lexicon of abstract photography. Foregoing the camera for a more intuitive approach to the medium, these artists create images that traverse the edge between agency and automatism, exploring the active gesture and the receptive surface as essential elements. From their embodied practices, a photographic disclosure unfolds—one that is not an indexical imprint, a representation, or a copy but an analogy, as cultural theorist Kaja Silverman has argued. In this way, the cameraless photographs of Hojnacki, Mace, and Ondrik reside at the locus of human perception, combining the action of light and a sublime sense of materiality to forestall what Silverman calls the miracle of analogy—the affective eruption of the past into the present. Drawing from multivalent sources of memory—from family to soil to respiration—these artists use photography as a method for dealing with grief, transmitting ancestral knowledge, or translating the pulse and rhythms of the body.
Silverman states that photography is the world’s primary way of revealing itself to us, and the works in Locus of a Gesture are emblematic of that declaration. In these works, the photosensitive surface becomes a site of haptic mediations, possessing a latent alchemy which, like the surface of a pond, registers the emergence of memories or patterns—in the land, the cosmos, the body, even the subconscious. While the dominant history of photography presents the fixed, representational image, these cameraless works challenge us to read photographic abstraction anew: as emanations of a revelatory language of gestures.
