Please join us for the Opening of my new show, Painting with Light: Contemporary Photography and the Legacy of Looking at the Gallery at J&T, 18 Bartlett Square, Jamaica Plain, MA. 6-8pm.

Painting with Light considers photography’s dynamic capacity to inspire awe. Bringing together the work of John Ross, Jason Zucco, Sarah Dinnick, Clint Baclawski and the Safarani Sisters, this exhibition presents contemporary photography as an expansive site of experimentation, resilience, and reverence. The artists draw inspiration from art history, even as they advance their chosen medium themselves.

On view from May 1 through June 12, 2026 at The Gallery at J&T in Jamaica Plain, the show examines how light—ethereal and impossible to hold—can transform ordinary subjects into moments for transcendence.

Photography literally means “drawing with light.” The artists in this exhibition push the medium beyond drawing toward the painterly. Through the lens of each artist, light is a collaborator and a metaphor for impermanence. A bloom at its peak, a heron stretching toward a mate, a body reflected in a window—these are fleeting phenomena. Their beauty lies in the fact that they cannot last.

Tracing a lineage from the Old Masters to the Modernists, this exhibition considers how artists have long used natural forms and natural phenomena to reflect on human fragility, aspiration, and wonder.

To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them. - Elliott Erwitt

John Ross, *Still Life with Fruit*, 2025. Archival giclee fine art print on heavy weight paper, framed in wood, under UV glass. 18 x 18 inches framed. Courtesy of the artist.

John Ross’s meticulously composed still lifes echo the classical language of the Dutch Golden Age and the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio. By representing flowers and objects with painterly precision, Ross invites us to find dignity in a curated reality of his design, adopting the slowed pace and spiritual appreciation of life before digital ubiquity.

Ross is one half of the duo behind PATCH NYC, an art and design company with an international cult following. Both he and his partner Don Carney dance between the worlds of design and fine art. PATCH NYC has collaborated with some of the world’s most prestigious brands, including Hermes, Bonhams Skinner, J Crew, Miriam Haskell, Hygge and West, and Astier de Villatte, to create innovative jewelry and home decor.

Ross recently released a book of his photographs entitled Variations on a Theme, which will be available for sale in the gallery. Of his photography process he writes, “a black backdrop is my preferred starting point when I compose a still life, mostly because I’m enamored of the vast potential contained in those shadows, the anticipation of what will be brought to light and to life, like a darkened theater stage in that brief moment after the curtain rises and before the show begins.”

Jason Zucco, *Female Heron #3*, 2025. Photograph, pigment-based inkjet print on Hahnemühle Agave paper. 44 x 57 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

In contrast, Jason Zucco looks outward through the lens of a naturalist. Recalling the patient, anatomical devotion of John James Audubon, Zucco has spent years observing nesting colonies of Great Blue Herons in suburban Massachusetts. His unmanipulated images defy wildlife spectacle to capture intimate courtship rituals and nesting performance. What emerges is the extraordinary grace of a bird we might otherwise miss—captured with such clarity the forms appear almost too profound to be real.

Zucco is a sought after commercial photographer whose clients include car manufacturers, heavy metal musicians, and everything in between. He writes, “Traveling with my wife, Eliza, has always been an essential part of our lives. Over the years, we’ve found ourselves drawn to nature, and soon, observing animals became our shared passion. For me, wildlife photography became more than just a hobby—it became an obsession. Not only is it challenging, but it requires an immense amount of patience, which is a practice I’ve come to appreciate deeply. It’s a journey of quiet observation, waiting for the perfect moment to capture life as it happens. Wildlife photography also became a form of therapy. It calms my mind and has helped me improve my mental health in ways I never expected…This collection is a reflection of that journey: the process, the challenges, and the quiet moments of connection I’ve had with these birds. It’s not a painting, and it’s not photoshopped. It’s life as I saw it, captured through the lens of my Canon camera.”

Sarah Dinnick, *Initiation*, 2024. Archival pigment print framed in walnut with UV anti-reflective glass. 20 x 30 inches. Courtesy of United Contemporary and the artist.

Sarah Dinnick’s work enhances the exhibition’s meditative tone, deepening the theme of resilience and bridging the gap between observation and abstraction. Her photographs rely on a compositional insistence that recalls the formalist rigor of Alfred Stieglitz and the geometric, reflective experiments of Florence Henri.

Dinnick uses light to play with line and pattern, reminding us that we have agency in our ways of seeing. Moments and memories take shape. Her formal restraint is both defiance and embrace; light becomes the threshold through which interior reflection takes place.

The artist’s commitment to care and healing extends into her life as an activist. Committed to the cause of human rights, she helped establish Human Rights Watch in Canada over 20 years ago. She has served as its Chair and sits on the Executive Board in the UK, where she lives now, and Canada.

Bahareh and Farzaneh Safarani, who exhibit collectively as the Safarani Sisters, extend the theme to the moving image. Their video paintings (video projected onto oil paintings) treat time itself as a canvas. Their subtle video performances appear to illuminate their canvases from within. Gradual changes unfold inside the world of the painting, reminding viewers that transformation is constant—even when a scene appears still. For Farzaneh and Bahareh Safarani, light isn’t just illumination—it is a process based on historical study and practical experimentation.

London-based art writer Siena Palese explains, “To stand before the Safaranis' work is to reside at a threshold. The painting holds its breath, a single moment suspended in emotion. Then there is the video, infinitely alive against it. Combined, they create a tension between stillness and motion. The painting is a moment, frozen. The video is the life surrounding it. At the heart of the work is a woman, unnamed. In the paintings, she watches the world from within, waiting. In the video, her life is exterior. It is imagination. It is alive, and the viewer feels everything she feels: her rage, her pain, her joy, her desire.

Bahareh and Farzaneh Safarani are twins from Tehran, Iran, who have lived the same life twice. They came to Boston to study at Northeastern University, where making art beyond the canvas was expected. The video element fell into place at Northeastern, where, after their first test, classmates said their paintings were breathing. The collaboration mirrors the work itself: two people, one shared history, one visual language. They argue, they negotiate, and they arrive somewhere neither could reach alone. Viewers stand before their work for twenty minutes, against an industry average of eight seconds. They leave uncertain what they saw, what was painted, and what was projected, what was real, and what they imagined. ”

Clint Baclawski, *Oasis*, 2017. Red Mirror Plexiglas / Red Plexiglas on black Acrylic, Archival Pigment Backlight Prints, clear polycarbonate tubes, 2' LED bulbs. 44 x 80 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Clint Baclawski tests the limits of photography’s elements, dismantling bulb, print, color and space, then reassembling them in ways that provoke new looking. Drawing inspiration from California Light and Space Movement artists like James Turrell, Baclawski proposes light as something that can take up space, light as 3-D object. Baclawski’s installations paint with light beyond the frame, using shape to dissolve landscape into luminosity.

Baclawski will present a full-scale vinyl print of the original photograph installed directly on the wall. In this way, the full image and the fragmented image will be in dialogue, “allowing the viewer to move between the photograph as a singular captured moment and as a dispersed, reconfigured experience.”

He describes his experience in his artist statement: “Just north of Joshua Tree National Park lies the desert city of Twentynine Palms, home to the Oasis of Mara—a site shaped by time, ritual, and survival. First inhabited by the Serrano people, the oasis carries a quiet legacy: a palm tree planted for each child born in the first year of settlement, forming the twenty-nine trees that give the city its name.

In April 2017, I stayed near this site and encountered an unexpected scene within the oasis—an anchored, uninhabited houseboat… it possessed a cinematic stillness that felt suspended between reality and fiction. Drawn to this tension, I created a single large-format photograph, Oasis, capturing the moment as both document and illusion. In translating the image into a sculptural form, I became preoccupied with the surface of the water—its stillness, its capacity to divide and reflect. This led me to physically split the presentation: plexiglass bisected into two planes, with a red mirrored lower half evoking the waterline and a red acrylic field above. The intervention transforms the photograph into an object that hovers between image and environment, reflection and presence.”

Across the exhibition, the artists share a commitment to technical precision, research, and patient looking. But more importantly, they share a belief in the power of wonder and awe. In a cultural moment defined by speed and artificiality, Painting with Light offers a space to engage deeply, to pause, and to experience the quiet astonishment of being alive.

Cover Image: Sarah Dinnick, Shimmer. Archival pigment print framed in walnut with UV anti-reflective glass. Courtesy of United Contemporary and the artist.

Painting with Light: Contemporary Photography and the Legacy of Looking will be on view at The Gallery at J&T from May 1 - June 12, 2026. All works are for sale. For more information, please contact robin@misstropolis.com