Atlanta Center for Photography—2026 Corinne Adams Emerging Artist Fellowship Cohort:
Gabrielle Barnett | Landon McKinley | Montenez Lowery | Ross Landenberger
June 11–July 25, 2026
Opening Reception Thursday, June 11, 7–10pm
Day and Night Projects, in collaboration with Atlanta Center for Photography, is proud to present the 2026 Corinne Adams Emerging Artist Fellowship Cohort group exhibition: Trying to Remember Something Too Important to Forget. Centered on a range of relationally disparate and individually intentional ideas, these four Georgia artists offer lens-based works exploring a range of ideas, from queerness through an Appalachian cultural lens, to memory, the residue of visibility and questions of repair and reclamation.
Gabrielle Jade Barnet’s Desire Body series is an ongoing photographic project that examines fatness, motherhood, intimacy, and visibility within contemporary culture. Drawing from both constructed and observational moments from her daily life, she create images that blur documentation and performance, asking viewers to confront the assumptions projected onto bodies like her own.
Stemming from the desire to photograph the landscape he was raised in, Landon McKinley’s work is interested in how both memory and photography mirror one another and ultimately represent the impossibility of preservation or permanence. As both fail to remain resolute or capture reality, McKinley uses photography as a device to both underscore the diminutive nature of its own depictions and explore its phenomenological possibilities.
How can the tools used to propagate systems of power be turned back against them? This question guides Montenez Lowery’s multidisciplinary practice. He repurposes colonial and oppressive instruments, transforming them into sites of reflection and cultural affirmation, with photography as the foundation.
Through his cameraless exposures of Mountain Dew, Ross Landenberger reclaims the soda through a queer lens as a cultural icon representing the region of Tennessee he is from. From the soda’s early “Willy the Hillbilly" mascot to its later hypermasculine branding with flavors like Voltage, Live Wire, and Freedom Fusion, Mountain Dew reinforced stereotypes of Appalachian masculine identity he was in constant friction with.
Trying to Remember Something Too Important to Forget will open with a free, public reception on Thursday, June 11, 7–10pm, and the artists will be present. Viewing hours are Fridays and Saturdays, 12–5pm, or by appointment.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Gabrielle Jade Barnett
Gabrielle is a lens-based artist from Louisiana currently living in Athens, Georgia.
Working primarily in photography and video, her practice explores fatness, motherhood, desire, and the intergenerational passage of shame through constructed and observational imagery. Her work blends staged and everyday moments, using self-portraiture and moving image to examine visibility, vulnerability, and the politics of looking. Barnett received her MFA in Photography from the University of Georgia. Her ongoing body of work, Desire Body, challenges dominant narratives surrounding fat visibility while centering tenderness, intimacy, pleasure, and the complexities of living within a marginalized body in contemporary culture today.
Montenez Lowery
Montenez is a multidisciplinary Black-American artist and writer based in Atlanta, GA. Working primarily with alternative photographic processes, his practice explores Black identity, memory, and loss, with recent work examining colonial infrastructures, photography’s role in shaping racial narratives, and contemporary cultural appropriation. He holds a BFA in Photography from Ernest G. Welch School of Art. He is a recipient of the IDEA Capital Grant and Atlanta Contemporary’s 2026 Nexus Fund, which is administered through the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and is a Georgia Youth Advocacy Fellow with the National Center for Civil and Human Rights.
Landon McKinley
Landon is a photographer and artist currently based in Atlanta, Georgia. His work explores transfiguration, conceptions of the rural landscape, chickens, and the failure of photography and memory. He received his MFA from the University of Georgia in 2025. McKinley’s work has been published and shown by the likes of FotoFilmic JRNL, and Joyland Magazine among others.
Ross Landenberger
Ross is an artist working primarily in photography who was raised in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Currently based in Atlanta, Georgia, he is a recent MFA graduate in Photography from Georgia State University's Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design. His images have been featured in The New Yorker, Financial Times, and on NBC News and have been published in books by Hoxton Mini Press, Routledge, and the Atlanta Center for Photography. In 2025 he had solo shows 5 Mountain Dews at THE END Project Space and To Snare the Sun at Gallery 72 in Atlanta.
