Chasing Shadows, Finding Light

As described by Haze Gallery founder and curator, Irina Rusinovich, the exhibition features bold and emotionally resonant photographic works across conceptual, fashion, fine art, and documentary genres by acclaimed artists including Xiomaro, Jaina Cipriano, Zhou Yang, Lance Pressl, and Lucie Mink. Together, they trace stories of memory, loss, transformation, and identity — told through the poetic interplay of shadow and light, contrasts, silences, and the emotional pull of illumination. It’s a sensory journey through visual narratives reflecting themes of resilience, healing, rebirth — curated to be felt as much as seen.

Rusinovich explains that:

In Xiomaro’s photographs, the city is not a backdrop — it is a conscious, layered being. A witness. A mirror. His series, curated for Chasing Shadows, Finding Light, invites us to navigate a space where physical reality dissolves into visual metaphor, where reflections in glass and water fracture time, identity, and meaning.

Drawing from the tension between presence and absence, Xiomaro uses the architecture of cities — their windows, storefronts, puddles, and passersby — as canvases upon which multiple realities overlap. His images are not staged, but they feel cinematic. Every frame captures the simultaneity of urban experience: joy and exhaustion, anonymity and spectacle, cultural pride and dislocation.

The works echo the psychological landscapes of dream states: blurred boundaries, fragmented memories, half-seen figures. In this context, “I Love NY” becomes more than a tourist slogan — it’s a mantra echoing through crowded streets, a memory suspended between childhood iconography and adult disillusionment. “Reflected Consciousness” doesn’t just portray a street scene; it exposes the watcher and the watched, the intimate collapse of gaze and surveillance.

Xiomaro’s practice stands at the intersection of visual anthropology and poetic abstraction. He transforms ordinary city moments into meditative studies of perception, cultural identity, and the human condition. In these works, we don’t just observe the city — we are drawn into its recursive gaze, lost in its shadows, searching for our own light.

Presented as part of the gallery’s ongoing contemporary photography series, this digital curatorial feature broadens international access and visibility for both artists and audiences. Organized into thematic chapters, the exhibition invites viewers to engage intimately with the delicate tension between darkness and illumination, chasing the invisible threads of personal and collective histories that shape the human experience.

All photographs are available for exhibition and purchase. Contact Xiomaro