Ceaphas Stubbs graduated from Rutgers University with a BA in Visual Arts in 2011 and went on to earn an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013. In 2012 he completed a residency at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. He was the recipient of a Christopher Lyon Memorial Award in 2013 and nominated for the Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in the spring of 2012. In 2013, Stubbs gave artist talks at the SALT Institute in Beyoğlu District, Istanbul, Turkey; and at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. His work, “…And Everything Will be Created Here…” (2012), is in the Lyon Family private collection. His works have been reviewed in The New York Times, Brooklyn Rail, Skowhegan’s SPACE/LAUNCH, EXPOSE Magazine, and AGAVE Magazine. In 2016, Stubbs had his first international exhibit at the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA) Museum in South Korea. Stubbs has worked as a staff photographer for The Daily Pennsylvanian, and as a freelance, corporate, and fashion photographer since 2011. Since 2014 Stubbs has taught analog/digital photography, animation, and digital media at Brookdale Community College, the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, and Lycoming College.
Statement
Ceaphas Stubbs’s photographs are an exploration of narrative weight and meaning, as well as black sexuality and pleasure. Stubbs’s process starts out as studio-based collage-sculptures made from materials such as chemically stained photographs, fabrics, magazines, and studio detritus, which are then photographed and dismantled. His works function in a space that is the intersection of photography, sculpture, and painting, where the images fluctuate between different meanings. His compositions rely on the principles of sculpture such as volume and gravity, principles of photography such as light and perspective, and principles of painting such as color. The painterly quality is both a critique and a declaration of the power and value of iconography, while the three-dimensionality of the photographs is an invitation for conversation; an entry point to investigate associations and signifiers that subvert ritual and evoke nuance through color, space, and imagery.
