Breaking Free: The Photographic Object

Friday, October 2, 2026

5:00 PM 9:00 PM
A Photographers Place
5100 Lacy Ave Ste 100,
Raleigh, NC 27609

Curator: Dale Rio

Sally Chapman

Contemporary photography is escaping its historical confines as a two-dimensional medium and exploding into an expansive array of three-dimensional forms as artists take an experimental approach to creating photo objects. 

The three artists in Breaking Free: The Photographic Object exemplify different approaches to transforming a photographic image into a 3D work of art. From a 2D starting point, each creates treasured objects that form a bridge between private reflection and public engagement. Exploring issues such as memory, time, and personal and communal aspirations, each embraces the tactility of fabrication and the manipulation of her chosen material through the use of a personalized creative methodology.     

Deliquescence: Séverine Chauveau

Sally Chapman creates photo book objects that can present as standard book structures or be displayed as sculptural pieces. In them, she creates imagined worlds that explore the myths, ideals, and spiritual aspirations of the communities in which the original images were made.
Using a collection of found studio photographs as source material,.

Séverine Chauveau prints images onto handmade clay pieces and stones using liquid emulsion and creates reliquaries, icons, and video art. With these “memory objects”, she explores concepts of erasure; the preservation and loss of memory, humanity’s relationship with the passage of time, and our own eventual but inevitable disappearance.  

Dawn Surratt’s work is informed by over two decades of witnessing the human condition while working with hospice patients and families. Creating an intimate experience for the viewer through her choice of scale, she creates both small objects and sites of visual

meditation through large-scale installations that feature image-based tableaux, reliquaries, and book structures that incorporate both handmade and found objects.  

Impenetrably Obscure: Dawn Surratt