Jesse Ly makes time for care, labour and visual change

By Olivia Hart

Jesse Ly, a 2023 finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize, presents a developing body of photographic work, try, take time – take time, try, through a Lenscratch feature dated 29 October 2026. The project asks how care and the rigidity—and rage—needed to produce change can share one pictorial field. Its answer is deliberately unsettled.

The post names no physical venue, work list or individual image titles. That omission makes the viewer rely on Ly’s account of sequence, symbol and material. In other words, the photographs have to carry their own instructions.

What does the sequence hold together?

Ly describes the project through a deliberate vocabulary: “The works make time for concerns related to setting affirmations, safe keeping, protection, and preparedness – assigning and attributing value through the representations, symbols, moments captured and held close.” Pictorial sequencing and referential iconography do the conceptual work, placing one representation against another.

The statement locates a second tension in vision itself: one’s field of view blends degrees of needed softness and conviction. For Ly, looking is not passive. Firmness supplies direction; tenderness makes room for compassion. Care, here, is an active practice rather than a decorative mood.

The source does not name individual images or identify their depicted scenes, so it would be unsafe to claim a particular visual motif. What it does establish is the sequence’s method: representations, symbols and held moments receive value through their relation and interpretation. That method makes comparison more important than spectacle.

How does the practice leave the frame?

Ly writes that they combine photographic approaches with sculpture, bookmaking, assemblage and writing to expand imagery. The materials are not side trips. Photography supplies the record, while sculpture, book structure, assembled matter and writing test how an image behaves when it becomes an object, a sequence and a proposition.

Identity enters through representation, observation and comprehension, particularly through transitional states of existence and the adornments that accompany them. Context and actuality meet in the frame, and the frame is asked to distinguish presence from portrayal. This is conceptual photography in the useful sense: the picture is an apparatus for testing what seeing settles, and what it leaves unresolved.

Much of the writing turns inward without becoming merely confessional. Ly considers the self, people with whom they have immediate discursive relationships, inhabited spaces and objects of interaction. Sequencing, intervening and compositional examination re-contextualise physical, ambiguous and psychological space; perception, futility and liminality become working materials rather than labels.

At its most ambitious, the body of work joins adversarial conditions with softness, then asks what matters and motives sustain aspirations and ideals. Ly’s closing question is historical as well as personal: how can histories and experience be used “to move forward to shape, change, and grow for the better”? This is not easy optimism. It names the labour required.

What does the institutional record establish?

Ly is an Asian-American photographic and image-based artist with a BFA from the University of Cincinnati’s College of DAAP. At the University of Dayton, they currently serve as Graphic Design and Photography Media Facilities Coordinator. The role adds institutional context to a project organised around care, labour and change, though context is not evidence of intent.

Solo exhibitions have included Filter Space in Chicago, RoyGBiv Gallery in Columbus, Foster Gallery in Dedham and Gallery Photoland in Olympia. Group exhibitions include the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, FotoFilmic in Vancouver and the PH Museum in Bologna. The venues span five US cities and two countries beyond the United States, although no dates are supplied.

Ly’s record includes an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council and a Regional Artist Renewal Grant through the National Endowment for the Arts; the 2023 Aperture Portfolio Prize finalist citation adds a prominent photographic distinction. No monetary values or dates are supplied for those two earlier honours.

Who supplies the editorial frame?

Epiphany Knedler, the interdisciplinary artist and educator whose biography accompanies the feature, explores how people engage with history. She earned a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Political Science from the University of South Dakota, then an MFA in Studio Art at East Carolina University. That combination gives the feature an interdisciplinary frame.

Based in Aberdeen, South Dakota, Knedler is Assistant Professor of Art and Chair of the Art Department at Northern State University. She is also Content Editor with Lenscratch and co-founder and curator of the art collective Midwest Nice Art.

Her record lists the New York Times, the Guardian, the Vermont Center for Photography, Lenscratch and Dek Unu Arts as places where her work has appeared. Awards have come through Lensculture, the Lucie Foundation, F-Stop Magazine and Photolucida Critical Mass. The list places her historical inquiry across several publications, exhibition spaces and named award routes.

The post points readers to Ly’s Instagram account, @jessely, and Knedler’s, @epiphanysk. Lenscratch also states that posts may not be reproduced without permission from its staff and the photographer. Both details are administrative, but this is an online presentation and the rights line is part of its terms.

Where is the work heading?

Because try, take time – take time, try is explicitly a body of developing works, its next test is not conceptual consistency for its own sake. It is whether Ly can make tenderness and the force required for change occupy the same sequence without either cancelling the other. The 2023 Aperture recognition gives momentum; the images must now carry the argument.