How do we make visible the invisible act of breathing, a gesture so essential it often escapes notice? Daniel Hojnacki treats breath as both subject and material, placing his work within a lineage of artists who've grappled with how to picture something with no edges. Robert Rauschenberg's Hoarfrost works (1974–76) began with an accident: ink left on the cheesecloth that printers used to wipe their plates, transformed into images. Rauschenberg named these works for frost, since the fabric held the traces the way a cold surface holds vapor — faint, brief, shifting with the air. Ann Hamilton extended this inquiry inward, using her own mouth as the camera's aperture. An opening made for language became a way of looking; speech gave way to the click of a shutter. The resulting photographs read less as portraits than as residues of a body's boundary in flux.

Continuous Exchange sits within this lineage yet resists our impulse to flatten breath into metaphor or wellness mantra. Instead, breath is something we acknowledge but rarely pause to observe. Hojnacki's photographs demand that pause and question the body’s boundaries. In Rise/Fall, a chest is suspended mid-inhale, an apparition. Exhale (I-III) uses smoke soot treated glass plates, a unique form of the cliché-verre printing technique, to register what the body has just released, making absence tangible. In Catching a Breath, years of patience accumulate on frozen glass, treating a single exhalation as an event worthy of careful, almost forensic attention. These works become material records and fleeting proof that something vital passed through the body, however briefly, however impossible to hold.

It is a collection of ongoing works by Daniel Hojnacki exploring ways in which the photographic process can be used as an apparatus for observing the body and its spontaneous cyclical rhythms. Harnessing the volatile and vaporous elements of soot, frost and light, the works presented in Continuous Exchange capture the body in states of transient elemental shift, using the photograph and experimental printing techniques as a conduit to poetically visualize the understated and overlooked.

In his large-scale ongoing series Catching a Breath (2022- ongoing), the observation of the breath is celebrated as a mindful long-term ritual. Frozen and frosted sheets of glass are used in the darkroom as Hojnacki’s photographic negatives, which are then able to still and capture the heat and vapors of a breath before it momentarily vanishes onto light sensitive photographic paper. Accumulating over the course of several years, this work showcases the breath as an intentional practice of grounding, performative recordings which have continued to be reminders of the importance of slowing down and calibrating the body in space. Smoke soot delicately holds the impressions of boldly fluids in Exhale (I-III); the chest is stilled in the act of taking in a deep breath in the work Rise/Fall; and a hand emerges into the frame of a photograph attempting to grasp a plume of smoke escaping through the artist’s fingers. 

The works exhibited in Continuous Exchange are attempts at impossibilities, capturing acts of disappearance and return to the self, leaving the viewer with open invitations of curious speculation and introspection. The photographs and techniques used are one of a precarious nature, almost on the verge of disappearance themselves. Soot, frost and light are recurring materials which generate and propose acts of self-awareness and observation. The alchemical gestures of Daniel’s work confront and confuse that which makes us human, visualizing encounters on an intimate and molecular level.