The fourth edition of Radial Survey, Silver Eye Center for Photography’s signature biennial, unfolds less like a survey of photographic trends than a collective state of becoming. Titled Resolve, the exhibition brings together six artists working within 300 miles of Pittsburgh, a geographic circumference that, by design, excludes art-world metropoles like New York and Chicago while drawing forward the dense constellation of artists, teachers, and experimenters working across the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest. The result is an exhibition that makes space for uncertainty, highlighting work that is still actively discovering itself.
Radial Survey Vol. 4 at Silver Eye Center for Photography
It’s a sensibility that differs sharply from photography’s longstanding drive toward precision, a history that Executive Director Leo Hsu reflects on in the exhibition catalogue: “We are enchanted by the pursuit of technological perfection. At different moments in photography’s history: mammoth plats and f1.0 lenses, Kodachrome colors that are more vibrant than what the eye sees, Cinemascope and Gigapixel. Even the endless scrolls of tiny images that colonize our minds represent ever-increasing efficiency of access and speed.” Radial Survey Vol. 4 pivots away from this inherited narrative of progress. Instead, it foregrounds artists working through processes that remain deliberately unresolved: projects in flux, questions still forming, images that refuse instant legibility.
“Nothing here feels set or finished,” Hsu says. “These artists are discovering something in real time, and the excitement is being with someone in that moment of realization.” It’s an ethos that runs through the exhibition, where each artist approaches photography as a site of vulnerability. In a sort of self-dialogue, several of the participants draw directly from their own previous work, a process of revisiting resolved work only to unsettle it again.
Introducing the Artists
Across the gallery, that sense of active searching takes multiple forms. Amelia Burns cuts up and recomposes her own photographic archive, treating past images as raw material for new hallucinations of Americana. McNair Evans meditates on liminal states—between leaving and arriving, seeing and being seen—through pictures that operate in the space between documentary and metaphor. Christine Lorenz builds a new visual language from the study of a common mineral, transforming macro photography into a site of wonder. Ian John Solomon ties land and body into circuits of memory and futurity, while Juan Orrantia’s “still lifes” destabilize the visual legacies of colonial history. And SHAN Wallace takes aim at the clean reproducibility of digital imaging, resisting the impulse toward photographic control and instead embracing unpredictability.
Despite the artists’ differences in method, a through-line emerged organically as Hsu and Deputy Director Helen Trompeteler worked with them: a shared commitment to experimentation, accompanied by a refusal of fixedness. The term “resolve” captures this dual structure. As Hsu puts it in his essay, the term connotes both “resolution”—the fixedness of form—and “resolve,” the ongoing effort, commitment, or belief that motivates artistic engagement. The artists in this edition do not pursue clarity for its own sake. Instead, they assert, in Hsu’s words, “instability, transition, and liminality,” establishing visual languages that illuminate questions rather than providing answers.
Connection Through Exhibition
That emphasis on process is supported structurally by the biennial’s nomination system. Beginning with Volume 3, each participating artist recommends potential candidates for the next iteration, creating an ongoing network of relationships. Hsu emphasizes that this model brings forward artists who are not only making compelling work, but who are deeply enmeshed in their communities. Many of them are teachers whose practices are shaped by mentorship and parallel lines of discourse. The nomination structure shifts curatorial authority outward, relying on artists to identify the practices they believe should come forward next.
The 300-mile radius amplifies this idea. Hsu describes the radius as “basically within a day’s drive” of Pittsburgh, a scale large enough to cross multiple states and artistic contexts, but intimate enough to sustain reciprocal relationships. Rather than treating the region as a coherent identity, Radial Survey acknowledges its multiplicity. What unites these artists is not aesthetics or geography but the shared experience of creating work just beyond the gravitational pull of major art centers. In that sense, the biennial becomes as much about cultivating a regional ecosystem as it is about displaying new work. It offers viewers a chance to recognize the density and diversity of photographic practices happening just out of frame.
A Little Old Brings a Little New
At the same time, Resolve keenly attunes to broader currents. Many artists in the exhibition engage with the history of photography, but always with a self-awareness that disrupts the mythology of photography as a neutral or transparent medium. “Everyone here is playing with the medium Hsu says, “recognizing that it has always been contingent, always shifting.” This resonates in his essay, which suggests that what makes a photograph “photographic” is not merely its technical precision but its capacity to shape how we perceive and remember the world around us.
What binds the exhibition is not a thematic message so much as a shared orientation toward discovery. In a cultural moment marked by anxiety and fatigue, the artists of Resolve model a way of moving through the world grounded in patience. Their works resist closure and turn toward curiosity. What emerges is a space open enough for viewers to arrive with their own questions and feel, within uncertainty itself, a sense of shared presence.
Radial Survey Vol. 4 is on view at Silver Eye Center for Photograph through February 7, 2026.
Story by Shawn Simmons
Photography Courtesy of Silver Eye Center for Photography
Subscribe to TABLE Magazine’s print edition.
