Opening August 8, 2025 this gallery will be displayed at Photo Opp through September 13, 2025
Catch it at any of Photo Opp’s programming or during open hours TBD
Photo Opp is pleased to host something once was, something still is
an exhibition of new works by Jaeden Hannus—and the artist’s first solo show.
Consisting of photography and sculpture, this exhibition looks to surface and traces, building on historical conversations and writing around photographic theory.
“The photograph encapsulates a temporal oscillation, always signifying in relation to a past and a present, and anticipating a future. It refers to the moment of its making as well as the many possible moments of its viewing.”
something once was, something still is gathers images that linger—after the moment, after the gesture, after the surface has already begun to shift. It dwells in aftermaths, in residue, in the softened imprint of what has vanished. Each photograph proposes not certainty, but speculation.
This exhibition is as much about the medium itself as it is about the content of any individual image—photography’s disobedient relationship to time, its haunted materiality, its slippery allegiance to truth. These photographs do not describe events; they follow the gestures that linger after them. They invite the viewer not to look at something, but to inhabit the suspended space of after—to stand in relation to what once was, and what might still be forming.
The work contains an obsessive return to surface. The façade becomes a recurring site of inquiry: a skin, a veil, a wound. A threshold between interior and exterior, between image and structure, between what can be held and what continually slips away. These surfaces are not blank—they are inscribed, overwritten, scarred. The work becomes a palimpsest of memory, a palimpsest of place. I return to these surfaces as though they might speak—or as though they already have.
The site of this exhibition is itself an archive of disappearance. The former Moses Montefiore Synagogue—its worn walls remain, its purpose changed—functions as more than backdrop. It is another trace, another image. Its history is inscribed not in plaque or signage, but in the subtle persistence of space: light that still filters through old windows, the texture of aged walls, the threshold where ritual once passed. The photographs do not try to overwrite this history, but move beside it. The architecture becomes both container and collaborator, its memory folded into the temporality of the images.
And yet, the show resists conclusion. It does not declare. It dwells. It speculates.
It asks: How does space remember? How does light mark time? What might a trace return to us—and what might it never reveal?
Jaeden Hannus (b. 2004, Greenville, WI, USA) is an image-based artist working between Chicago and Northeast Wisconsin. He is currently pursuing a BFA in Studio Art with an emphasis in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (expected 2026).
Hannus has received several scholarships and awards, including the SAIC Recognition Scholarship, SAIC Contemporary Practices Scholarship, Ox-Bow Scholarship, and the Kikeri-Sinha Travel Fellowship for his recent residency at Kriti Artist Residency in Varanasi, India.
His work has been exhibited at various galleries across the Midwest and beyond, including the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, IL), Site Galleries (Chicago, IL), Ox-Bow School of Art (Saugatuck, MI), and Photo Opp (Appleton, WI).
His work has been featured in several publications and collections, including the SAIC Photography Department Annual Catalog 2024–2025, From Our Streets: Photo Opp, Volume 2, and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection (Chicago, IL).
Hannus’ second solo exhibition, Self Portrait as a Wisconsin Man, will be presented at Site Galleries in Chicago, IL in September 2025.
Jaeden Hannus
jaedenhannus@gmail.com
jaedenhannus.com
@jaeden.hannus (instagram)