Thursday, October 29, 2026
Doors at 5:30pm. Artist talk at 6pm.
25 Dederick Street, Kingston, NY
On Thursday, October 29, we welcome Jarod Lew and John Shen (Woodstock AIRs) to “Meet the Artist.” Lew will present an overview of his work and practice. Shen will be talking in depth about three ongoing bodies of work, Straw Inscriptions, After Image, and Stranger In The Land. The talk will trace the ways his practice moves between experimental photographic processes, personal history, and questions of memory, identity and belonging. From handmade cameras, durational image making, and infrared photography, Shen will reflect on how different technologies shape not only the images we make, but also the ways we understand ourselves and the world around us.
Join us on select Thursday evenings at CPW, when we host illuminating talks with local and visiting artists. “Meet the Artist” allows the public to get to know new work, to hear about artistic processes, and to meet friends and other local artists. The evening takes place at CPW’s gallery at 25 Dederick Street in Kingston, NY. It is free and open to the public. Coffee, tea, and snacks are served.
“Meet the Artist” is made possible by generous grants from the Arnold & Augusta Newman Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. AIR support from the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.
Jarod Lew is an artist who draws on photography to explore intergenerational encounters with diasporic loss, displacement, and postmemory. Through this exploration, his work contends with the performativity of race and its instability as a locus of meaning.
His project, Please Take Off Your Shoes was shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2021, and was exhibited in a group exhibition at SFMOMA titled Kinship: Photography and Connection in 2023. His other project, In Between You and Your Shadow, examines his relationship with his mother, who was the fiancé of Vincent Chin–the subject of a hate-crime that brought national attention to matters of Asian American civil rights. In 2025, Lew will mount his first museum exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art titled- Strange You Never Knew.
His works are held in public and private collections including the Cantor Art Center, Detroit Institute of Arts, Kadist, San Francisco, Harvard Art Museum, University of Michigan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Lew’s work has been written about in Aperture, Artforum, Elephant Magazine, and Aesthetica Magazine.
Lew received his MFA in photography at the Yale School of Art.
John Shen is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is an exploration of the shifting relationship between the apparatus, image, memory and object. Born in China and raised in New Zealand, he works across photography, painting, moving image and performance, using both historical processes and cutting edge contemporary techniques to weave a dialogue between how images shape personal memory, identity and belonging.
Across his work, Shen exploits different ways of image making a way of locating himself in relation to the people and places around him. His work has included direct positive photographs from a handmade camera constructed from drinking straws, infrared photographs made across the United States, first person drone footage and custom built Schlieren imaging apparatuses that render otherwise invisible movements of air visible. Each experiment in process creates a different way in which he is able to understand his complicated relationship between intimacy, embodiment, dislocation and memory.
These explorations into technology are always grounded into the personal subjects that motivate the work. The straw inscriptions are imprints of intimate encounters with friends and family, while Shen’s infrared photographs see the American landscape to consider his own place as an immigrant. His work using FPV drones and 360 degree cameras shifts between embodied and disembodied perspectives, grappling with a discombobulation driven by video games, virtual reality and drone warfare. Schliern Imaging extends this inquiry toward the incorporeal as it relates to love and desire. Rather than using the technologies in his practice to produce a complete self contained representation, Shen exploits each apparatus to reveal the gaps between what can be recorded and what can be felt.
Shen received his MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art in 2026 and his BFA in Photography and Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2020.
Banner image © Jarod Lew