• Five people sit together in a line outside.
    Softball team at VSW, Mauro Altamura, 1979, hand colored black and white photograph. Left to right: Mauro Altamura, Tina Dahl, David Chappe, Mark Brady, David Henry.
  • Project Space Residency

    May 20 – June 17, 2025

    Jessica Chappe is a mixed media storyteller who focuses on how people find belonging through community, place and self. Her work is a social practice; conducting oral histories, using photography, videography, archives, and journalism to help expand our understanding of humanity and what keeps us connected. A Bard graduate twice shortlisted for the 2020 Sony World Photography Awards she has published photo essays in New York Magazine, the Times Union and has featured photos in the LA Times. She recently curated a show at CREATE Council for the Arts in 2023 and spoke at CPW about her practice in 2024.

    “Synchronicities”, named after the focus of my father’s senior thesis at VSW back in 1979, will contain three archives: personal, intergenerational, and institutional. My father, David Chappe, passed away when I was eight years old. The house I grew up in was filled with his artifacts–many from VSW–of a life well lived. These objects, especially, held more questions than answers which led to my visit in 2019 when I began connecting with his friends and was handed boxes of his work from the Trace Archive I had never seen before. This project will be the culmination of years spent piecing together his life between 1972-79 leading with the question: what did this creative network mean to him and others?


    VSW Project Space Residencies are supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the New York State Legislature, Monroe County, and Joy of Giving Something. Photography-based artists participating in the program receive support from the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.

    Logos for Monroe County, New York State Council on the Arts, and Leonian Foundation