2025 Sitka Artist Residency: Conner Gordon
Diatom
New Work from the Sitka Artist Residency
Jan 8 - 31, 2026
I stop by the wayside and pick up a seashell. Or what looks like a seashell, at least; it’s an object I can’t quite place. It’s about the size of an egg, delicate, crystalline in structure. At some angles, vibrant reflections scatter across its surface, while at others, it is dull and colorless.
I can feel the material start to give way as I pull it from the sand, hairline fissures breaking out beneath my fingertips. I worry about handling it too much, in case it shatters or someone stops to wonder what I’m doing. Yet I keep turning it over in my hands, searching for the facets that catch the light just so.
I am reminded of how a prism splits light into its constituent elements. In images, it always looks so seamless, as one color fades smoothly into another. Yet I wonder about the point where this gradient shifts into a binary, whether a single point of fracture exists.
I lived in Oregon for four years, and in that time, I made thousands of photographs of the coast. Among them were lumen prints made in residence at the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology, at a time when I was considering what it might mean to leave this place. In that moment, I looked back through my photographs to try and process this experience–to understand what my relationship with the coast meant to me, and what form it might take going forward.
Now, having left the Pacific Northwest, I’m still thinking about that object. Whenever I think I’ve found the angle, the shimmers on its surface morph and recede. It is a prism with no edge–there is no single facet, no moment of clarity that breaks down the whole. Yet still I keep turning it over.
Conner Gordon (b. 1994) is an artist and educator exploring photography as unreliable narration. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States, and he has received awards including a 2025 Blue Sky Photography Residency at the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology and a 2019 Fulbright Research Grant to Serbia. He has self-published four photography publications, including Where Does That Flower Bloom, a hand-bound photobook released in 2025. He received an MFA in Art from the University of Oregon and is a Lecturer in Photography at Washburn University in Topeka, KS.
About the Sitka Residency
The Blue Sky/Sitka Center Photography Residency was created to increase Sitka’s visibility in the photography community through a collaboration with Blue Sky Gallery, one of the most well-known photography galleries in the Pacific Northwest. Each year, Sitka offers 2 alumni of Blue Sky’s exhibitions and Drawers program the opportunity to be in residence at Sitka Center for up to a month. Residents are selected through a jury of Sitka Center and Blue Sky staff, along with a Blue Sky Residency alum.