Process Is Everything at Filter PhotoGelatin silver prints by three artists prompt thoughtful meditation in “Locus of a Gesture.”

In the current show at Filter Photo, aptly titled “Locus of a Gesture,” various obscure and unusual procedures have created dreamlike textural images that take the viewer simultaneously into life’s core and deep space. The abstract works, created using a variety of chemical and reactive processes, exhibit both creativity and a willingness to suspend belief of what photography actually entails. Three artists, each working differently yet harmoniously, are cleverly joined by curator Kristie Kahns, showing processes that employ the substrate of coated paper to diverse ends.

In his “Looks Like Nothing” (2022-25), David Ondrik uses “unconventional development techniques to coax a palette of violets and ochres out of the gelatin silver paper,” later combining them to create chemigrams that address the weight of loneliness, environmental disaster and the grief of loss. Like a garden, though, they are also beautiful for beauty’s sake, and only their darkness hints at sorrow and fear.

Dakota Mace, also using the chemigram process, creates abstract portraits of a night sky, embellished with a beadwork of traditional symbolic Navajo silver-smithing designs that speak of her people’s belief in the concept of a central fire around which the night sky’s constellations revolve. She pays homage to her ancestors and her native culture by titling the work in Diné—”Náhookos Bika’ II” (2022) meaning “Central Fire,” which is, in reality, the name of the North Star.

Daniel Hojnacki, the third artist in the show, uses the historical printmaking technique cliché-verre, which loosely translates as glass plate, to create the images in his “Rain Drawings” (2022) and “Body Language” (2022-26) series in the exhibition. In the process, using both photography and printmaking, Hojnacki etches “subconscious daily life into visible records of suspension” on glass plates coated in smoke soot and then prints them photographically onto gelatin silver paper.

All three artists work is intuitive, highly symbolic and time intensive, and the thought and artistic commitment that marks these delicate abstractions is apparent in the finished images. That Kahns, as curator, chose these particular artists to unite in this exhibition shows her curatorial insight and skill. Once again, Filter Space presents thought-provoking work that demonstrates both the ephemeral and historic essences of photography.

“Locus of a Gesture” at Filter Photo, 1821 West Hubbard, through August 8.