Between Fantasy and Reality: A New Exhibition on Artsy
1905 Contemporary is pleased to present Between Fantasy and Reality, a new featured exhibition on Artsy bringing together works by Tyler Shields, Jeffrey Czum, Nick Mele, and Phoebe Fitz.
The exhibition explores photography’s ability to occupy the space between the recognizable and the imagined. Across cinematic scenes, surreal compositions, intimate moments, and dreamlike environments, each artist transforms reality in a way that feels entirely their own.
Tyler Shields is known for photographs that combine cinematic drama, fantasy, and carefully constructed storytelling. His images often take familiar subjects and push them into heightened, unexpected scenarios, creating photographs that feel suspended somewhere between film still and fantasy.
Jeffrey Czum approaches this idea through surreal digital landscapes that blur the boundaries between photography, memory, and imagination. Familiar environments become subtly altered, creating scenes that feel both believable and impossible at once.
Nick Mele brings a different kind of fantasy to the exhibition. His photographs explore glamour, eccentricity, leisure, and social theater, often turning moments of everyday luxury into playful, highly stylized scenes. Beneath their polished surfaces is a sense of humor and unreality that makes the familiar feel almost theatrical.
Phoebe Fitz’s work introduces a quieter perspective. Through form, composition, and close observation, her photographs transform the body and the everyday into something abstract and contemplative, encouraging the viewer to look beyond the immediately recognizable.
Together, these four artists demonstrate the many ways photography can move beyond documentation. A photograph may begin with something real, but through framing, atmosphere, perspective, and imagination, it can become something entirely its own.
Between Fantasy and Reality invites viewers to consider where reality ends and interpretation begins, and to experience photography as both a record of the world and a space for invention.
