// This Low Mound of Earth //

These photographs are about a place that is not defined by parameters that can be drawn on a map. Growing up in a military family ensured that I never occupied a specific place for more than a few months or years at a time. This itinerant childhood not only made it difficult to answer the simple question of where I’m from , but also allowed me to become comfortable with the fleeting. This affinity with ephemera led to my interest in photography and how it can be used to show an embodied location versus a geographical one.

These photographs show instances of waste, near decay, and compromise in a culture that is mired in excess and rapidly approaching its limits both in the environment and in society. The world is, for the most part, shown as I have found it -- broken, incomplete, ordinary yet complex and fascinating.

These cramped scenes contain barriers, shrouding the answers, ensuring eyes never lay on the object that allows it all to make sense. I am not trying to mimic reality , but question it. Photography is dangerous in its appearance of reality, and I am interested in the subtle things within a frame that makes me question whether or not what I am looking at is real -- I want to be able to believe a photograph, but not trust it.

Jen Mawson (b. 1994) is a photographer based out of Boston, Massachusetts. She received her BA from the University of Missouri in Interdisciplinary Studies, with an emphasis in Photography, Religious Studies and English. She graduated with an MFA in Photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2020.

You can see more of Jen’s work on her site: www.jenmawson.com

And follow along on her instagram: @jenmeowson

// as our bodies lift up slowly //

“This project is titled “as our bodies lift up slowly”, and I often say that making this work is about facing myself. As a person who has tended to compartmentalize difficult emotions for most of my life, I’m looking inward at the parts of myself that I previously found to be unsavory and tried to ignore. I carried negative thoughts that hindered my self-growth. There isn’t a lot of space for dreaming in an oppressive world, so I use photography as a tool to create a space where I freely navigate the various facets of my life experience and identity. I hope to weave the viewer in and out of my memories and thought processes through the use of archival family photographs, digital/physical photographic manipulation, text, and switching between black and white and color as a way to mimic the ebb and flow of memories and time. These images, some of which take place in nature and within interior spaces encompass themes of family and lineage, cultural and religious upbringing, the purging of fear and shame, self-acceptance, and embracing spirituality as a way to heal.”

Vanessa Leroy (b. 1996) is a photographer from Waltham, Massachusetts. She is currently completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She remains on the hunt for new ways of seeing, remembering, and altering the world through photography. She is drawn to image-making because of the power it holds to create nuanced representation for marginalized people and uplift their stories. She sees photography as a tool for social justice, and with it, she hopes to create worlds that people feel as though they can enter and draw from, as well as provide a look into an experience that they may not personally recognize.

You can find more of Vanessa’s work on her site: vanessaleroy.com

& Follow along on instagram: @VanessaLeroyPhoto

“While photographing for this project at the American Museum of Natural History, I felt an awe that I’ve felt since visiting the museum as a kid. The dioramas seem as though you could fall into them, and the animal specimens seem alive – in one image, one primate puts an arm around another and the gesture is tender, if implausible.

While some of these images play off the personified drama generated in dioramas and display cases, others respond to the ambiguity of what we are able to learn there. In omitting all text elements of the displays, I hope to make apparent viewers’ desires for and expectations of information from the museum, as well as the limitations of that information. The museum, like photography, is conventionally understood to bring objective truth to its viewers. The museum, like photography, presents a visual reality that is at once exactly described and woefully untrue.

The production of knowledge in the museum is shaped by the desires of those who control it. Both museums and photographs have a history of being used to express power and dominion. I included photographs of exhibits about Native Americans because I feel that they speak to the museum’s warping of Native histories. At the same time, I worry that I am furthering the harm done by the museum by excluding any contextual information about the objects in these exhibits. For me, these photographs motivate exploration of my subject position, both as a white American implicated in the continued abuse of Native populations, and as someone who wields a camera and must face the complex and violent legacy of photography.

Ultimately, the aim of the museum, and of my photographs, is larger than telling the truth – both are spaces to hold questions, exploration, and reflection”.

Mika Simoncelli is a sophomore at Harvard University majoring in Art, Film and Visual Studies. Mika grew up in New York City and studied film photography at the International Center of Photography. In quarantine, Mika is pondering the possibilities and limitations of photography in expressing connection, touch, and embodiment.

You can see more of Mika’s work on their site: mika-simoncelli.format.com

“All of these images were made in 2020. Some of the images I made as an escape from isolation, pushing myself to leave my comfort zone both physically and creatively or to make something that wasn't rooted in social justice or public health; both topics have dominated this year and subsequently, my professional work (also included here).” -Philip Keith.

Philip Keith is an African American photographer born and raised in Boston, MA. He graduated Boston Arts Academy with a focus on Visual Arts in 2004. He has since worked as a Freelance Photographer in Boston, New York and Berlin, Germany. Now residing in Providence, RI he works for clients such as Bloomberg Businessweek, New York Times, The New Yorker and TIME Magazine.

You can view more of Philip's work at: www.philipckeith.com

or on Instagram at @philip_keith

// For The Next Realm //

“In For The Next Realm, I focus on the absurdities and contradictions built into the landscapes of the Pacific Northwest as a result of extractive capitalism. This project is born out of witnessing the accelerating environmental destruction of my home.

A combination of writings and photographs, For The Next Realm draws from documentary photography, speculative fiction, personal essays, and Marxist analysis. I'm attempting to machete-cut a pathway through America’s cavernous epistemological crisis as it manifests in the forest. What is a forest? Who should make decisions about how humans interact with it? What needs to change? But more than an attempt at some sort of prescriptive project, I am making these pictures as an excuse to go deep into the forest so that I can listen to what it has to say.”

Will Matsuda’s work as a writer and photographer focuses on the intersections of race, capitalism, and the environment. He is currently a student in the Image Text MFA program at Ithaca College. He is based in Portland, Oregon.

You can see more of Will’s work through his site: willmatsuda.com

And on instagram: @willfujiomatsuda

// Florida Grown //

Florida Grown is an ongoing series documenting my nieces growing up in central Florida in a similar conservative environment as I did. While looking at the progressive fade of the mystique of childhood, I am also reexamining my own childhood through my nieces’ experience. Their religious upbringing is explored against a suburban setting, a landscape that always seems to be in conflict with the wild, natural world. The portraits reflect my discomfort with the expectations, ideas of femininity and gender roles placed on them. Over the past 10+ years as the five girls have grown into adolescence, I’ve also evolved as a photographer, shifting in style and format -- a process that works in tandem with the girls’ own development.

Jenica Heintzelman is a Guatemalan-American photographer born and raised in a suburb of Orlando, Florida. She attended Brigham Young University in Utah where she completed her BFA degree in photography and documentary filmmaking. Since moving to New York City in 2010, she has worked as a freelance photographer and studio manager as well as retoucher for the Richard Avedon Foundation. Jenica received her MFA from the Hartford Art School’s International Limited-Residency program in 2020 where she was awarded the Stanley Fellman Award. Currently based in Brooklyn, NY her work explores themes of vulnerability, familial relationships and the notion of healing.

To see more of Jenica’s work, visit her website: www.jenicaheintzelman.com

Or follow along on instagram: @jenicah

// hail mary, marie, martyr //

“hail mary, marie, martyr started out as a 5 minute audio piece I made one night in the spring of 2019. After moving back to Boston and the recent sale of my childhood home, I inherited the vhs tapes my father took on every “significant” and many not so “significant” days in the first decade of my life. I stayed up one night watching and cutting tape, piecing together sounds of my childhood that had stayed vibrant in my memory and self-mythology. 

My experience is a collage of thoughts, memories, and the present. In my work, I exorcise the sounds resonating in my head by traveling to where they are stored and getting curious. It is a devotional practice to Time. In hail mary, marie, martyr I invite you to join me in the ritual. 

The piece comprises three acts: ab aeterno (00:00-11:41), all the fathers 11:42-16:02, and we are also divine (16:03-23:03). Each examines a part of my life and what I was taught to think about women, girls, and anyone with the potential or perceived potential to give birth. In the video, I’m performing a ritual to shed those narratives. You are participating. Doesn’t it feel good and healing not to objectify the woman in the bath?

I composed ab aeterno and all the fathers using family archive, samples from pop culture from 1987-1997, excerpts from recorded conversations with my partner, diary entries, spoken word, and original music. 

we are also divine was created for the HALE Collective in Chicago in April 2020 after multiple Republican governors tried to end access to abortion during the COVID-19 pandemic. It features personal abortion stories told and recorded by Maleeha Aziz, Nick (last name redacted), and Nik Zaleski, as well as news reports, my own documentary recordings, and other archival tape.”

Jenn Stanley is a time-based artist from New England who lives in Allston with her husband and two cats. She’s also an audio producer, reporter, and writer; you can frequently find her work at WBUR’s The ARTery. Before moving back to New England, she lived in Chicago where she made CHOICE/LESS, a documentary podcast about reproductive and sexual health and justice. 

She’s the co-founder of coven/convene, a new community and digital event space for witchy, time-based, & esoteric arts, grounded in ritual with the intention to heal together and cultivate joy. 

You can see more of Jenn’s work via her site: www.Jenn-Stanley.com

______________

coven/convene I: the shadow; Oct. 29

Join Jenn Stanley & see more of her work via coven/convene’s event coven/convene I: the shadow, taking place virtually on October 29.

Learn more & purchase tickets via Eventbrite:

www.eventbrite.com/covenconvene-i-the-shadow-tickets

coven/convene is a livestream sonic event grounded in ritual and healing arts to explore the shadows, build community, and cultivate joy.

Note: we recommend viewing video with headphones in full screen mode at highest quality setting available.

//Tell Them I Said Hello//




Tell Them I Said Hello, portrays the identity issues among immigrants. Jinwoo Hwon Lee 이훤 shares his experience in form of poetic images.

Lee writes, 

“I was 19, when I came back by myself to America since being a toddler. 

I did not speak what everyone spoke. I knew no one. People in the small town noticed me by my color. Koreans born and raised in America thought I was too ‘Korean’. People back home thought I was too ‘American’. I was neither one of us nor one of them.

The eclectic black and white photographs in the series reflect the never resolved physical and emotional distance between two homes. The images hardly show a full face of a person. This signifies the scattered and undermined identity as a liminal. Oscillating between a citizen and an immigrant, I never felt fully understood or wholeheartedly considered. Some nuances were always dismissed.



In a greater context, the seemingly disjointed objects and people photographed in the series portray the alienated under different settings. The loose strings among the images are metaphors of many individuals’ firsthand testimonies. Joining this personal confession, viewers are invited to imagine their own version of alienation.”





Jinwoo Hwon Lee 이훤 (B. 1987) is a photographer and a poet, based in Chicago, US. Lee uses text and (or) images to narrate ongoing emotions as an immigrant. He focuses on sporadic sense of belonging and associated struggles experienced in form of alienation, separation and isolation.


While residing in the United States, Lee actively publishes his work through books, magazines and literary publications in both Korea and the United States. His work has been exhibited in Scotland, China, South Korea and the United States. 



Life Framer Gallery exhibited and collected Lee’s monochrome series <Tell Them I Said Hello> in 2019 and the Photography Curator of High Museum, Sarah Kennel, also curated the same series as part of the internationally juried group exhibition: <PORTFOLIO 2020>. The image, Intruded and Unapologetic, from the <Tell Them I Said Hello> was also exhibited in an internationally juried group exhibition curated by a Magnum photographer: Bruce Gilder. In 2019, Infinite Art Museum collected three images from Lee’s <Human Textures I> series. A year later, seven images of the same series were published as a detachable photo-zine in Korea. Curator Mary Stanley selected Lee as one of the noteworthy emerging photographers in 2019 and curated his work in the internationally juried group exhibition <On the Verge> at APG Gallery.


Lee debuted as a writer in 2014, winning the New Writer Award by <Literature and Consciousness> Magazine. Five years later, Lee received the honor of the Excellent Book of the Year Award from ARKO (Arts Council Korea) for his second photo poetry book: Let Us Not Be Too Desperate 우리 너무 절박해지지 말아요 (2018). In the book, Lee presents several poems in images, sometimes combined with text. Lee terms such a way of working, "Poem-ography". Lee’s first photo essay book, When Your Gaze and My Gaze Move Into Opposite Directions 당신의 정면과 나의 정면이 반대로 움직일 때 (2019), is quintessential Poem-ography. In the book, he anthropomorphizes objects, creating 120 images taken from their imagined perspectives with a prose.

 Lee continues to expand on the Poem-ography series. His works of Poem-ography have been published in several magazines and in anthologies. Paper Magazine currently commissions Lee to publish an alternating photo-essay and photo-poem series.




To see more of Jinwoo’s work, check out his website: www.PoetHwon.com

Or follow him on Instagram or twitter: @PoetHwon.





Image Label & Price for Editioned Prints

(Each image is editioned to 5 - comes with a certification and signature by the artist)



1. Standing In Between, 2019 – Pigment, 10”x20”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 1/5)

2. Citizens, 2019 – Pigment, 10”x20”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 2/5)


3. Citizens II, 2019 – Pigment, 12”x18”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 1/5)


4. An Assimilated Discordance, 2019 – Pigment, 12”x18”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 2/5)


5. Absently Present, 2019 – Pigment, 12”x18”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 1/5)

6. Not Answerable Questions, 2019 – Pigment, 12”x18”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 1/5)

7. Almost Returnable Goods, 2019 – Pigment, 12”x18”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 1/5)

8. A Border, 2019 – Pigment, 12”x20” , Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 2/5)

9. A Revolving Door, 2019 – Pigment, 12”x18”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 1/5)

10. Intruded and Unapologetic, 2019 – Pigment, 18”x12”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 2/5)

11. Silence of the Doors, 2020 – Pigment, 18”x12”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 2/5)


12. Carefully Removed, 2019 – Pigment, 20”x20”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 1/5)

13. Burning the Last Bridge, 2019 – Pigment, 18”x12”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 1/5)

14. Non-protective Colors, 2019 – Pigment, 12”x18”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 1/5)


15. Forced to Settle, 2019 – Pigment, 18”x12”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 1/5)


16. A Foreign Fruit, 2020 – Pigment, 18”x12”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 1/5)

17. Dissimilated Roots, 2019 – Pigment, 12”x18”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 1/5)


18. A Melting Name, 2019 – Pigment, 10”x20” , Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 1/5)

19. Forced to Settle II, 2018 – Pigment, 12”x18”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 1/5)


20. Unanimously American II, 2018 – Pigment, 12”x18”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 1/5)


21. Unanimously American, 2019 – Pigment, 12”x18”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 1/5)

22. A Fading Room in a Person, 2019 – Pigment, 12”x18”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 1/5)

23. A Scattered Man, 2019 – Pigment, 12”x18”, Print: $780 Framed: $1080 (Edition 2/5)

// Si Caigo en el Canal, Nada, Nado //

There are forests and towns submerged below the water’s surface in Panama. The drama of the harshly altered landscape and the man-made divide stirs a quiet presence in the everyday. While pieces of the material world float by in colorful containers, daily life carries on, integrated along the shores of an international waterway.

I was introduced to Mr.Brown, a local fisherman and nontraditional medicine man. We sat on the edge of the canal one morning waiting for fish to bite when he slipped and fell, toes splashing into the water. In response to my worry, he quickly assured me: “Si caigo en el canal, nada, nado.”

If I fall in the canal, I simply swim.

This photo/video series presents an array of windows from which to view and reconsider the Panama Canal. A bridge between oceans, a gap between lands, a once exclusive U.S zone, a fossil excavation site, an artificial water source, a chasm, a scar, a glimpse of the sea.

Tova Katzman is an artist and visual storyteller from Massachusetts. Her work stems from conversations and research while documenting social and environmental themes that intersect with science, global politics and spirituality. She received her BFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. In 2017, she was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to pursue an art and research project in Panama. The resulting series, "Si Caigo en el Canal, Nada, Nado" was exhibited in Panama City in 2018. She has given various photography workshops and has spoken about her work at the Panama Museum of Contemporary Art and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Tova lives and works as an artist, freelance photographer, and collaborator between Panama and the U.S.

You can find more of Tova’s work on her site: www.tovakatzman.com

& follow along on Instagram: @tovakatzman

// DEAR, SINCERELY, //

“Dear, Sincerely, fixates on my experience of my father’s passing. Addressing the archival and ephemeral nature of memory, loss, and grief, the work reflects on formulative experiences and the futility of future memories. By utilizing a darkroom approach of unfixed printing, images from my past exemplify the ephemerality of moments that are now lost. Through this process, the pictorial content actively diminishes as the photographs are further exposed to light. Exhibiting these works alongside images that directly reference the lasting effects of his death, this body of work demonstrates my coping with temporality and honors the life of my father.”

Jesse Ly (B. 1997) is an artist originating from Dayton OH, who now currently resides and works in Cincinnati, OH. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts with minors in Art History and Critical Visions from the University of Cincinnati’s college of DAAP (2020).

Ly is a visual artist who primarily uses a photographic approach that incorporates processes of sculpture, installation, bookmaking, and writing to inform imagery. His work explores identity through representation in photographs and its liminal qualities of existence. This examines how photographic depictions may incite differentiation in presence and portrayal through representation versus actuality.

To see more of Jesse’s work, check out his website: www.jessemly.com

Or follow him on Instagram: @jessely

ENJOY house (2018-2019)

ENJOY house presents forms of escapist amusement as hostile and uninhabitable environments. Subjects and spaces are produced in the pursuit of ideals, where sites for entertainment are fashioned by their shortcomings. Through the negation of color, this series focuses on how the construction of fantasy inevitably entails its own failure.

An absence emerges from the cumulation of disparate places and their visitors, all of whom become actors participating in the same theater. This theater consists of costumed spaces that take on the appearance of purgatories rather than playgrounds. By photographing moments of authenticity at the height of artifice, I look at the ways people manufacture themselves to conform to the props that surround and confine them. The discovery in each picture lies in the decontextualization of activity, where nonperformances take center stage and expectations of glamour evacuate in the physicalization of desire. The formal simplicity of greyscale attests to this symbolic power, emphasizing a generation’s inheritance of a modern empty experience.

Shelli Weiler is an artist from New York with a BA in Studio Art from Wesleyan University, where she studied photography among other digital arts practices. Her work primarily revolves around the production of fantasy and its failure, using portraiture to document performance in a non-documentarian way. She is currently based in Brooklyn with Basil the tabby cat.

To see more of Shelli’s work, visit her site: shelliweiler.com

& follow along on Instagram: @s.h.e.l.l.i

Häsler R. Gómez (h.r.g.) was born in Guatemala City, Guatemala in 1993, but has lived in the deserts of Reno, Nevada since the age of four. Growing up around the construction sites his father and eventually himself worked on, Gómez developed an affinity and respect for the materials they used on a daily basis, as well as a need to labor and make. His work predominantly deals with issues of personal, political, and social desire and probe the complexities and connections between immigration, oppression, and gender.

His work makes reference to the home, the construction site, and sacred spaces in order to give voice, physicality, and space to memorialize the daily traumas experienced by marginalized individuals. Gómez’s work is steeped in the poetics of oppression: from a reductive visual language to a limited use of materials to esoteric references, his work hinges on creating a power dynamic where the work and the viewer are simultaneously the oppressor and the oppressed; the works vacillate between being immediate/mundane and being silent/inaccessible, yet the viewer holds the power to create meaning and assign significance. In doing this, he aims to create a space that presents narratives that assert resilience and resistance rather than aggression and defeat.

Gómez holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of Nevada, Reno. He is the founder and creative director of AVE COLLECTIVE, an artist collective aimed at addressing representation within and outside the gallery context. He currently works out of Stead, NV.

You can find more of Häsler’s work on his site: www.haslergomez.com

Or via Instagram: @haslergomez

This Place Looks Like a Paradise; This is Paradise.

When a father dies before his time, he remains for his son an eternal shadow, and an unstable memory that fades. The unresolved tension between remembering and forgetting keeps constant company with the present.

My obsession with remained photograph of my father, and with the reality that one never fully knows one’s parents, led me to this project: “This Place Looks Like a Paradise; This is Paradise.” A quote extracted from found family footage.

I selected my family archive taken before and after Islamic revolution in Iran as my window of time. The era when pervasive social fear and anxiety were palpable. I integrate my personal photographs with remained archive in relation to examine the nature of the photographic medium, particularly that of personal and family archive related to history, memory and records. I found remnants of photos that left imprints intentionally ripped off the page, my father’s mystical phonebook which I proceeded to call each person listed in it, and a play by Brecht which he acted to support the activist and director who later executed few years after the revolution. I chose photos taken in this particular time frame because of distinct imbalance between what the photograph depicts on the surface and memories of bitterness he hid for years to protect his family.

To create this work, those vanished moments captured on film and digitally are tangible and have become unique resources to build my elliptical narrative. I re-imagine and interpret his life by looking closely through the archives. I am making this work based on the real stories that come before and after revolutions regardless of location in the world.

Just before my father’s death, he woke from a dream and spoke a few words to me, but I struggle to recall what he said. Since that time, I have been pre-occupied with imagining his last dream. I search through fragments of personal and family archives, moments that emerge from thinness and banality of one’s trace. I travel the roads we drove when I was young. I visit the places where he was photographed, strong and alive.

A photograph can be a tool we use to remember a face, or a familiar place we believe we once understood. By the act of superimposing and reproducing images I seek to highlight a mixture of isolation and intimacy, past and present identities, solitude and connection. These photographs demand the viewers to see not with presumptions of family photograph that can taint our memory but as constructed pictures and how does self-censorship affect our personal history?

I seek to reveal the most distant place to explore idiosyncratic forms of memory. The subject is disappearance; its permanence and totality. I cannot find my father, a man who loved the ocean, a man who feared the ocean.

Navid Haghighi is an artist and educator currently based in Boston. He holds an MFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He was a multi-year recipient of Dean’s scholarship and teaching fellowships from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and as a Visiting Artist at Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). Navid received a grant from Massachusetts Service Alliance to serve with MassArt’s Center for Art and Community Partnerships to nurture relationships by partnering with communities within and beyond college to engage college students and community youth. Navid has exhibited his works at numerous galleries and museums both nationally and internationally, including FOTOHOF Gallery, Salzburg, Austria, Attleboro Art Museum, MA, Bakalar and Paine Galleries, Boston, MA, Atlantic Wharf Gallery, Boston, MA, SYNC Gallery, Denver, CO, Plymouth Center for the Arts, Plymouth, MA and South Shore Art Center. He works mostly with photography, video and uses immersive installation to experiment with the ideas of past and present identities, loss and disappearance, solitude and connection.

Prints from this body of work are available for sale through Aviary Gallery, please see price list attached. Additional works from the artist available. For any inquiries please contact AviaryGallery[at]gmail[dot]com for more information!

You can check out more of Navid’s on his site: https://navidmood.com

& via instagram: @navidphotography

Jewish thought suggests that the memory of an action is as primary as the action itself. This is to say that when my hand is wounded, I remember other hands. I trace ache back to other aches - when my mother grabbed my wrist too hard pulling me across the intersection, when my great-grandmother’s fingers went numb on the ship headed towards Cuba fleeing the Nazis, when Miriam’s palms enduringly poured water for the Hebrews throughout their desert journey - this is how the Jew is able to fathom an ache. Because no physical space is a constant for the Jewish diaspora, time and the rituals that steep into it are centered as a mode of carrying on. The bloodline of a folktale, a tradition, a song, pulses through interpretation and enactment. Treating photographs in ​Kavana​ as such, I explore notions of Jewish memory, narrative heirlooms, and interpretive image making; ​the works are positioning themselves in the past as memories, in the present as stories being told, and in the future as rituals to interpret and repeat.​ To encounter an image in this way is not only to ask what it feels like, but to ask: what does it remember like?

Hannah Altman is a Jewish-American artist from New Jersey. Her work interprets relationships between gestures, the body, interiority, and lineage, exploring the structures that perpetuate them using photographic based media. She has recently exhibited with the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Blue Sky Gallery, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, and Junior High Gallery. Her work has been published in the Carnegie Museum of Art Storyboard, Vanity Fair, Huffington Post, and British Journal of Photography, among others. She has delivered lectures on her work and research across the country, including Yale University and the Society for Photographic Education National Conference. She is the 2019 recipient of the Bertha Anolic Israel Travel Award and 2020 MFA graduate at Virginia Commonwealth University.

You can see more of Hannah’s work on her site: www.hannahaltmanphoto.com

And follow along on her Instagram: @hannah.altman

Inspired by film and societal constructs of femininity, my work is an exploration on the formation of character, narrative, and identity. Drawing inspiration from domestic space, I construct each image in order to direct my own narrative. These photographs are a world created to speak freely without interruption. By utilizing the past--both historic and cultural references--I am able to juxtapose queer existence with classic Americana. Although my work is made up predominantly of self-portraits, my goal is for viewers to consider their own responses to queerness as they see it. By applying my own identity and queer experience, I hope to engage the viewer in an unfamiliar set of circumstances.

The photographs in my series ask: can we live comfortably outside the norm? How do these characters challenge the societal ideas of masculinity? Driven by emotion and intuition, I utilize melodrama to discuss ideas of visibility and invisibility, what is acknowledged and what is not-- questions that remain relevant in today’s politics.

Kevin Moore is a current senior in photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (BFA '20). The Boston-based photographer chooses to work with self-portraiture in order to discuss his own experiences translated through historically inspired fabrications. Aiming to relay queerness on camera, he interprets intuitive ideas into narrative stills by setting up scenarios that allow him to speak freely without interruption. Kevin is influenced greatly by gender performativity and film, ideals of mid-century American culture, what goes into creating a set, and how far he can transport the viewer.

You can find more of Kevin’s work on his site: kevinbennett.xyz

& follow his work on instagram: @_kevinbennett

LOST BOY SCOUT

As I’m nearing the age my father tried predicting his own future, I can’t help but feel less certainty, and more of disillusionment, within me than when I was 9. And this is echoed in my friends, and especially the men and boys I see around me, a confusing lack of purpose for a future where we will eventually be needed, but one that is just as easily ruined by our very existence.

Combining staged portraits, and typical documentary photographs, as well as pictorial images of the current American landscape, this is an attempt to portrait an increasingly complicated and by extension, more undefined ideation of modern men.

Billboards, signs, iconography seem to be the final haunting pieces of a past masculinity no longer apt for the modern-day. In the end, this project has become a portrait of the non-direction this identity can be built upon if it is drawing upon the past for this new mythology.

This project is currently in development and ongoing.

Brian Van Lau was born in 1996 in Honolulu, Hawaii. His work primarily deals with romanticism and the ability to affect memory through visual text. He focuses on topics of family, isolation, and of constructed idealism in both. His main interest in photography is its ability to serve as both evidence of reality and the simultaneous perversion of it. He is self-taught, basing much of his work in suburbia within the vallery of Issaquah, Washington, where he currently lives. His work was recently shown on Aint-Bad, Fotoroom, C-41, From Here on Out, Mull it Over, and was shortlisted for a Lucie Foundation Scholarship.

To see more of Brian’s work, check out his website: brianvanlau.com

And follow his Instagram: @zerkalou

NOEMA

In 1961, in the small Spanish village of San Sebastian de Garabandal, four young girls had an apparition of the Virgin Mary. They entered a state of ecstasy in which they became completely unaware of their surroundings and sensory perceptions. Reportedly, witnesses would pinch the girls, pierce their skin with needles, lift them up and drop them onto rough rocks, and yet they remained entranced. The light and presence of the Virgin is all they claim to have experienced.

Twenty years later, in the town of Medjugorje, Bosnia & Herzegovina, six children also had simultaneous visions of the Virgin, with similar ecstatic qualities. These visions have persisted for the last forty years, with several of the seers continuing to experience regular visitations today, often in the presence of hundreds of pilgrims.

Noema is a body of work that investigates the aura of place and religious experience by searching for signs of the Virgin Mary’s presence in these two locations. Alongside original photographs made at both sites, Noema also includes large-scale images that have been appropriated from video footage of the visionaries taken during their apparitions. These emphasise the impenetrability of the individual religious and phenomenological experience, and speaks to the separation between what is apparently being seen and what is photographable.

Michael Swann is a photographic artist currently completing his MA at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol). His work explores aspects of religious belief, mysticism and phenomenology and aims to understand how photography can be used to communicate such themes. Michael’s latest body of work, Noema (2018-20), follows the search for the Virgin Mary’s presence in two locations in which she has reportedly been seen, and has been shortlisted for the ShowOFF exhibition at Krakow Photomonth 2020.

To see more of Michael’s work visit: www.michaelswann.co.uk

I hate the feeling of a damp swimsuit between my legs, sticky with sweat, melted chapstick, fruit juice. The imprint of grass on calf muscle, sunburn on only the left ear. Blisters that sting in the shower and sneakers with the bottoms peeling off. Now, we sit quietly while we watch TV, walls so thick we only hear the fridge humming under the voices. Do we wait for homeplace or do we create it?

__________________

These images build a queer community situated in the Midwest, examining what a utopia could look like in domestic and private landscapes. I center collected objects, hair, quiet performance, and unfetishized body. Sitting somewhere between reaction and fantasy, I pull materials integral to queer nightlife into the daylight. Using close friends and trans siblings as stand-ins for biological family, these images manifest a desire to have unconditional relationships without letting go of the landscape I grew up in. Shot on medium and large-format film, the images were made in areas around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and across Michigan, including friends, family, partners, interiors, and landscapes that repurpose the different layers of erasure experienced in this region.

2016-2019

J Houston graduated from Carnegie Mellon University, and they were an artist-in-residence at Otis College of Art, The Growlery, and Vermont Studio Center. J has received grants from Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, and Carnegie Mellon University, and their images of Pittsburgh’s queer community have been a finalist for the Duke CDS Essay Prize and Silver Eye Center for Photography fellowship. Their work has been shown at Houston Center for Photography, Turner Contemporary, Aviary Gallery, Amos Eno Gallery, CONTACT Gallery, Miller ICA, and New York Photo Festival, among others. This spring, J will have a solo show at The Java Project in Brooklyn.

If you are a queer or trans person in the greater NY region and would like to have your portrait taken alone or with a partner/friend, please reach out to J .

http://www.j-houston.com/

@j_houston

Liam MacCormack is a Boston, MA born artist who studied photography at Lesley Art + Design. Interested in the interplay of physical and metaphysical space, his work deals with how our environments alter our mental perceptions and vice versa. MacCormack currently runs the photography lab at Worcester State University and works for renowned atelier, Palm Press. He has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently with the solo show “To See a Man About a Dog” at Space Place in Nizhniy Tagil, Russia.

“Rain Shadows”

Our landscape is changing –

I keep thinking back to the New Topographics folks and how they must have felt like deer in the headlights. It’s like they could see the thing careening towards them, hurtling down the roadway, but they didn’t know there was two tons of metal between those two small suns. In a lot of ways that car was our ‘Image First’ experience of the landscape. In a lot of other ways, it was the destruction of the environment, and the ‘Prospective Topographics’ that offer us hope for the future.

Even the idea of a ‘new topographic’ is kind of funny now, right? The topography itself is disappearing! In an effort to maintain the landscape, we’ve ultimately culled it into something else. Basing our efforts on images and representations of the natural, we begin to see a natural world that feels a little too picturesque. The problem with a picturesque world is that we think it will last forever.

My goal in making these photographs was to both show the current state of our image-based landscape, as well as explore the methods in which we experience it. Video games, live streams, and social medias have become integral to shaping our vision of the land, as well as bringing access to many who, previously, couldn’t experience it firsthand. By integrating screen captures into my photographic practice, I attempt to explore landscapes that exist only as renderings, free of physical constraints.

I don’t know what the landscape of the future is going to look like, and I can’t even fathom the landscape of the past – but what I do know is that for a brief moment, we lived in both.

Andrew Paul Skoda (b. 1993, Illinois) was raised and attended high school on the far edge of the Southside of Chicago. He grew fond of making photographs when his father gave him disposable cameras to keep him entertained while his family went on long fishing trips to neighboring states. He received his BA in photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2017, and is currently based in Chicago. His work is centered around scrutinizing the associations and links between photography, understanding, and memory. Abusing the romantic documentary mode, Andrew exploits photography’s distinct capacity for narrative and punctuality to transpose a subjective, fragmented, and re-contextualized understanding of the crumbling infrastructure and shifting industrial culture in the Midwest. He is deeply interested in the psychology of image-making, and particularly seeks to better grasp the inner-workings of how we recognize and associate with images, our environments, and those around us. He only hopes one day to be able to find the negatives he made when he was a child with his father and mother, as he believes that those were the best photographs he has and will ever make.

L’appel du Vide (roughly translated into The Call of the Void) is the impulse to leap forward experienced while standing at the edge of a cliff, only to recoil. It is the urge to tug the steering wheel of a vehicle towards the opposing lane of traffic. Most infer that this desire to jump affirms the will to live, as the survival instincts of the brain force the body to reverse from danger. L’appel du Vide is concerned with the evaluation of both learned and inherited instincts, both in observation and practice. Critically mindful of challenging the viewer’s passive looking in the age of rapid digital consumption of images, while acknowledging that internet and smartphone culture has greatly increased general knowledge of communication using purely visual grammar, diction, and prose. The images work to convince the viewer by some subtle argument that true narrative and documentation is impossible, and that photographic images ripped from their respective contexts will never allow a narrative that is not broken and fragmented to exist yet still celebrates the instinctual process of looking and the deceptive nature of re- and de-contextualized images. They assure the viewer that fact, light, observation, and humanity are not committed to an unambiguous coexistence.

Austin Reynolds is a photographer based in Penngrove, California. His work primarily deals with the overgrowth of the American West, investigating the trivial within the landscape. 

This body of work includes a selection of photos taken in 2017 at rest stops, gas stations, neighborhoods and restaurants along Interstate 80, starting from Indiana and ending in California.

More of his work can be found at: https://www.austinreynolds.net

Who Will Remember Such Fine Times?

“In the face of great loss we all become mad. My particular madness manifests in a spiraling obsession to interpret the present photographically; to give everything around me a slice of immortality and immutability. The catalytic experience of losing my mother at a young age has lead to a practice of image making that is a strange combination of fear, love and curiosity.

My gaze has now turned to my father, whose madness takes root in the maintenance of 91 Grassmere St., the small cookie-cutter suburban structure that our family has called home. Over the past five-going-on-six years since he quit his job, my father has filled his days with a variety of domestic improvement projects. His present preoccupation is with the front lawn, the mood ring of suburban living. He is consumed with the appearance of order. We are both consumed with appearing to be okay.

This project is an attempt to construct a portrait of my father in all his complexities, analyzing his idiosyncrasies and details with the detachment of an anthropologist. Through the act of collaboration in creating images together, we are drawn closer. The camera acts as a mediator, allowing us to express ourselves without the limitations imposed by the appearances we both assume, creating a space for vulnerability and communication which has been absent from our relationship. Together, we are both trying to cultivate a physical, evidential record of our healing, our growth, our survival. Our lives, without her.”

Julia Hopkins is a Boston-based artist and photojournalist originally from Warwick, Rhode Island. She received her B.A. in Studio Art from Boston College in May 2019. She makes photographs surrounding the themes memory, family, and identity and frequently works in the book format.

For more of Julia’s work, visit: www.jhphotos.net

Mitchell Hurst is a documentary and landscape photographer who lives and works in central Missouri.

“This work began from a draw to photograph the American West. After a few trips west, and nothing to show for it, I decided to look at the Mid-Western landscape that I am familiar with. Missouri’s obvious history as an origin of expansion and trade was what inspired the first images I made. I began to notice a landscape that was ripe with remnants of early American prosperity and exploration. The states early economic success was based on the confluence of the two longest rivers in the US. Once these French and Osage Indian trade routes dried up, due to dwindling demand for beaver pelt, Missouri started to take shape. Natural features reflect the history of the Union slave state where caves were used as bunkers and hideouts during the civil war. Resources changed the landscape over time by near extinction of beavers drastically altering rivers and wetlands, granite and limestone becoming high commodities, the transition to soy as the major cash crop, and booming demand for livestock. These changes also shaped the lifestyle and culture of the state. The residue of that past is seen through decay which time and industry eroded, and the landscape that attempts to defy change. Countless small towns and family farms across the state struggle to endure the migration to cities and the takeover of large scale farming. What is left loosely pieces together the narrative of a place flush with middle American History”.

To see more of Mitchell’s work, visit his site: mitchellhurst.com

& check out his Instagram: @mitchell_jhurst

Mairi McCormick is a photographer from the northeast of the United States, and is currently based in Boston, MA. Having moved every two to three years since she was twelve, she finds herself increasingly intrigued by landscape elements of memory, and time. Mairi is due to graduate from the New England School of Photography in June.

What Happened Here is a project shot by Mairi McCormick in rural Vermont. It is a landscape she knows intimately as a resident. This project begins in the dead of winter. Over several months she has watched the seasonal transition from barren harshness to one of new life.

As she drove through the state, at times aimlessly, she thought of the capricious nature of life as it affected her family. Mairi was processing loss, sudden and gradual, as well as the glow of birth. She was drawn to places in the landscape where disruptions occurred: a tree growing in an old silo, a controlled fire in the middle of a snow storm, blood on the road for miles with tracks running through them. Elements of weather and light also play an integral role in communicating somber emotional ties to the places she investigates.

Throughout Mairi’s project, she is confronting the idea of discomfort; the uncertainty of what lies ahead, and the possibility of hope or its absence.

To see more of Mairi’s work, visit her site: mairimccormick.com

When I was about 10 or 11 years old, my Dad was driving Dan and I up to an ice fishing tournament on Lake Colby in the town of Saranac Lake. We probably left on a Friday night after school, so by the time we got close it was late at night. It felt like we were the only people alive as the truck continued down the black roads. It started to snow and I vividly remember the way that the wind blown snow streaked across the headlights, each flake building up into the white wall before us. I was proud of the late nights and early mornings that it took to be an ice fisherman. We would leave the single story motel before dawn to head over to Stewart’s where Dan and I would perform the ritual purchase of Pop-Tarts and Gatorade. The winters were long and cold in the mountains; the ice was roughly a foot and a half thick. It was more than enough to support the truck, but I always held my breath during those first few seconds. You can get hypnotized by the spin of the auger as shaved ice flows out and piles around the hole; you’re brought back to reality when the water comes bobbing up. Dan and I felt like men as we entered the tournament shack to register the trout we had caught. We didn’t talk much, but our ever present bonds did not need to be addressed.

Family and the landscape are inseparable in the photographic work of Kevin Williamson. Through the documentation of his family’s relationship to the natural world, Kevin has built an intricate narrative of human intervention in nature. Made throughout New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, these photographs aim to reveal the complexities that come with human relationship to the land. Inside this larger story, there are intimate moments of contemplation and grace. They repeatedly inquire, “how do we decide what is right”?

Exist is an ongoing project taken over the span of nearly a decade, depicting many changes in season and place. The focus of this work; animals, nature and passing moments can be seen as a metaphor depicting the nature of a human soul. 

Nature holds the power to reflect messages or moods back to the viewer, to touch the part of one’s being which it mirrors. Photography holds the power to seize in an instant an energy that is timeless and omnipresent. These images show an invisible line between my own existence and the subjects; two energy fields meeting to become one, even if only for that moment. This is a phenomenon only a camera can make possible. The images turn present to past with the click of a shutter; yet allow the past to live on in the present. 

Through the frame of a still image, the capture of pure energy and emotion can become a lasting visual and tangible experience. Exist shares seemingly ordinary, daily moments in order to reveal their extraordinary nature. By taking the time to pause an ever moving and changing existence, what is revealed is the eternal, fleeting nature and spirit found in a single moment.

Roslyn Julia is a photographic artist. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan in 2013 and is currently based in Ithaca, NY. 

To see more of Roslyn’s work, visit: roslynjulia.com

Shown here, are selections from two ongoing bodies of work Imagined Traditions and Trinity/Primer. Cronin approaches issues of disconnect, fracture, and absence through reimagining spaces, both interior and exterior, that have been altered by humankind. Crafting lies to tell a truth, Cronin doctors his images using both analog and digital methods. He may physically overlay negatives or combine parts of found photographs in Photoshop to reconstruct the strangeness and stillness of places that are uninhabited, but have been touched (scarred, rearranged) by the human hand.

Matthew Cronin is an artist living and working in Austin, Tx. He received his BFA with departmental honors from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is currently an MFA candidate at University of Texas at Austin. His work has been shown throughout the United States and Canada in cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Vancouver.

Website: www.matthew-cronin.com

Instagram: @matthewcroninstudio

Garrett Gould is an artist living and working in Boston. He is a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a BFA and concentration in Sculpture. He has a studio in the South End down the street from the SoWa district in Boston. He is exhibited nationally with recent exhibitions at The Aviary, Jamaica Plain, MA; Elevator Mondays, Los Angeles CA; Seymour2017, Los Angeles CA; How’s Howard?, Boston MA; FJORD Gallery, Philadelphia PA; and Lens Gallery, Boston MA. He also runs European, a project space in the 4th floor bathroom of a studio building in the South End. The space hosts two artists for each exhibition. The project’s program will focus on the relationship of the two artists, their work, and the intersections between private and borrowed space.

Garrett Gould’s work is interested in the gaps through which sensations, realness, and familiarity enter and exit his practice. He believes these elements necessary to a respiration that articulates his practice, a process of objects leading sculptures and sculptures following objects. He has made a diagram to help himself and others see this process in more detail (Seen to the left, last image of gallery). Gould wants his work to move forward through the path laid out in the diagram while moving in and out of sculpture, offering the viewer a form that maps one’s sense of familiarity and realness when looking at the work. As a maker, he wants to make forms that push and pull on these gaps.

Garrett’s work employs themes such as humor, violence, and illusion to retain the shape of memories that characterize the form while simultaneously undermining the expectation of the function and purpose within it. This subversion highlights discrepancies between one’s sense of realness and familiarity. The ability of these themes to retain the shape of memories combined with legibility of the intuition behind the work introduces the possibility of the eventual union of those two senses. Can one laugh and also understand? Can it be used and also disappear? Can moves themselves disappear?

These questions allow the forces of evocation and illustration to push inward and outward along the passage of time. This inward and outward movement is a process that disrupts the course of naming the graphic and sculptural decisions in the work. This results in an inability to fully map them as cultural marker and leaves the work in a state of constant suspension. Scale, replication, surface treatments, and faux-ness are tools Garrett uses in his process that reveal the space between naming and meaning in which the work is suspended. This encourages ambiguity in both the identification and interpretation of the form. The work becomes both like and unlike itself through a back and forth between an impression and a subversion. The persistent and fluctuating unease from this disorientation requires the viewer to resolve incongruities between what was evoked through making and what is illustrated from memory.

To see more of his work, visit his website: www.garrett-gould.com 

Casey Bennett (b. 1980, Grand Forks, British Columbia) is an urban landscape / contemporary fine art photographer currently based in south-central British Columbia, Canada. His clean photography of urban and semi-urban spaces is about exploration of places where architecture, landscape, portraits and the built environment intersect and a human presence can be felt around the corner. His work is also about transience, and ideas of change being brought in our surroundings and environment.

The project Hub City focuses on life in Williams Lake, British Columbia, an area of the province that has gone through significant cultural and socioeconomic transformations. Located in the Central Cariboo Interior, where individuals’ collective livelihoods and lifestyles have been, and are, currently heavily dependent upon certain industries–particularly the logging and mining industries. Generations of families have committed their lives and passed on an “identity” of working these jobs, becoming culturally bound to these careers. Bennett’s photographic project hopes to instill a visually compelling collection of images of this specific place in time and the prospect for insight into the community and its individuals who have shaped a region and created the character of a place. The environment is loaded with evidence from the past that is now layered with subtle manifestations about the inevitable future.

Aptly titled Hub City, this refers to Williams Lake as the central location that sits in the junction of Highway 97 and Highway 20, leading major routes to cities and points of interest like Kamloops (south), Bella Coola (west) and Prince George (north).

To see more of Casey’s work, visit his site: www.caseybennett.net

Huang Lucang was born in China in 1990. He earned his BA from Renmin University in Beijing and studied Architectural Design at Kyushu University in Japan. He also earned his MFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Over the past seven years, Huang has lived in Beijing, Fukuoka, Tokyo, Shanghai and Boston as a research scholar and an artist. His works explores the idea of illusion in imagined landscapes and spaces through the use of camera and computer. The fundamental contradiction contained in his works provokes questions about the relationship of imagery to the physical world, and exploring the ineffable nature of reality. Huang's work is included in private collections and has been exhibited throughout the United States. 

Lucang’s works focuses on the abstract shapes created by shadow, or computer graphics that appear in the form of imaginary landscapes. They are perceived by our common senses, but go beyond the perceptual territory by being titled and reformed. He aims to explore layers of the binary in this project: The light against shadow, a sense of place against a sense of nothingness, the outside against the inside, reality opposed to illusion.

“There are all these people here I don't know by sight or by name. And we pass alongside each other and don't have any connection. And they don't know me and I don't know them. And now I'm leaving town and there are all these people I will never know.”  - Carson McCullers

These photographs began during a period of transition as Knudsen moved from northeastern Massachusetts to New York City. The highway became his refuge as he traveled between his home and this new uncharted territory, often escaping one for the other. With this body of work he stitches a narrative of landscapes, people, and their markings to explore notions of isolation, rapture, and the longing for connection. 

Alex Knudsen is a photographer working in Massachusetts. In 2014 he graduated with a BFA in photography from MassArt. His photographs and books have appeared in various exhibitions and publications in the US and Europe.

For more of Alex’s work, visit: www.alexknudsen.com.

“here's my prayer:

that what happens to girls like me

who die dirty, give it up

with a shudder like pleasure—

pray that when we're killed as martyrs

we get loved like saints.”

-Daphne Gottlieb

The horror film genre is generally guilty of the objectification of  women through the use of cinematic language which presents them as desirable clichés. The victim featured is often portrayed as promiscuous and then targeted by the aggressive male because of her sexuality. When the genre defies this rule, it is generally because women are portrayed in the opposite manner: as virgins free of sexuality. These two exhausted portrayals of the female character - virgin or whore - rely wholly on issues of sexuality to define the character’s development.

The repetitive use of these characters shapes how women are viewed in society today and this cultural memory affirms behavior. Through manipulation of archival photographs by scanning or collaging, Meghan Braney removes the image from what it was, similar to how repetition of the portrayals of women removes us from the reality. In doing so, her work calls attention to the connections between crimes against women in the horror realm and mistreatment of women in society. This body of work begs the question: are these films and media based on reality or does society mirror them?

Meghan Braney is a fine art photographer currently studying at Massachusetts College of Art and Design to earn her BFA in photography. She grew up in Northbridge, Massachusetts and currently resides in Boston.

To see more of her work, visit her Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meg.braney/

Dru Hetrick’s American Colors series – utilizes the artist’s interest in older film cameras to study how the physical elements of an American era she never experienced before is connected to the America we experience today. When Dru thinks of ‘Americana’, she think of bright blues, colorful neon, and fresh white picket fences in front of newly painted houses. But in the context of today, where architectural materials favor more minimalist metal, concrete and marble, these older colors take on new meaning much like the dreams of the people and country who made them.

The creation and breakdown of the American Dream over the course of the twentieth century and beyond is fascinating to Dru and she hopes to explore physical remnants of this theme through this series. Some images reveal a golden age long gone – relics of the bright commercial age of the ‘50s and ‘60s – while others gain a new identity within the context of a new time. Dru acknowledges she will never get to live within the era in which many of the subjects of her photos were made new, so what’s left for her to experience is their decay – their fading colors.

Dru Hetrick is an analog film photographer originally from NYC and currently based in Boston, MA. Hetrick delved into the medium through personal documentation, travel, university study at Emerson College, and music photography. Upon discovering her favorite film format – 6x6 120mm – she started projects that studied the color of the urban landscape around her, while also carrying cameras with her to serve as a diary of the subtler beauties of her daily life. Dru is continually adding to her American Colors and Snapshots series.

To see more of her work visit her site: www.druhetrick.com

Within Shawn Rowe’s work, a quiet repose emerges, where moments of introspection grow long while light and atmosphere become tactile. Landscape imagery punctuates this self-portrait, serving as metaphor to discuss the symbiosis between nature and the body. V characterizes this relationship as both internal and external, with each body leaving marks upon the other. The power structures that support this dialogue manifest as visual interruptions in the intervening space between reflection and perception. In this work, Shawn creates a space to discuss a range of definitions of masculinity, sexuality and gender in order to articulate acceptance and resolve.

The title V describes the ambiguity of the project itself. In ancient times, V was used interchangeably with the letter U. V is the Roman Numeral for five and embodies a downward pointing arrow. For this work, the two lines that create the letter V intersect where the body and the environment exchange forces. These images represent a visualization of this conversation. Like the letter V, Shawn asks the viewer to bring their own associations and meanings to the images and the body of work as a whole.

To see more of Shawn’s work, visit: shawnrowephotography.com

In the face of great loss, how do we form meaning? Privately, we grapple with the event, we feel the sting and the irony of loss all at once. We always knew this was coming even though we didn’t know when. Publicly, we seek. Our minds become spiritual, there’s a vision in every parking lot, down every hallway. Every bird we hear is singing the song so and so used to whistle. Somewhere in these symbols we are meant to find solace. Yet the journey towards healing that we’ve embarked on feels more and more like a rat race, looping its wheel over and over until we exhaust ourselves back to normalcy.

In this ongoing project, Amy Fink works in contention with her family’s grief since the loss of her mother. This irreversible rupture changed everything, for all of them: how they see the world, how they consume their days, how they interact. While these motivations are not opaquely addressed in this body of work, these factors culminate and reveal themselves photographically to communicate broader themes of entropy, maternal care, nostalgic tendencies, and- in tandem, the folly involved in the impossible fight for control over it all.

Amy Fink is a fine arts photographer who received her BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2018. She was born and raised in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and currently lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. She is currently the Interim Director of Exhibitions at Aviary Gallery.  

To see more of her work visit: https://amyfink.format.com

“It’s Halloween, everyone’s entitled to one good scare.” -Beckett, Halloween (1978)

It’s our favorite time of the year over at Aviary Gallery: Halloween! We’ve selected our favorite submissions based on fright and folly, scares and skeletons, spiders and slasher films.

Featuring work by Meghan Braney, Caitlin Brookins, Alexa Cushing, Juliet Degree, Amy Fink, Ross M. Kiah, Maxwell Labelle, Tanya McGee, Joni McGinley, Amanda Parlier, Evan Perkins, Kiera Renz, Joseph Ritchie, William Sears, and Nolan Smock.