Kristoffer Johnson

Kristoffer Johnson

Dana Stirling

To Which We Return | To Which We Return focuses on the impermanence and fragility of the human body and the physiological problems that are inherent in existence. The human body is a fragile construct that ages and decays. The Buddhist concept of impermanence states, everything is temporary and subject to rise and fall. Mortality is an unavoidable and inevitable fact that humanity must face despite the sense of control which society and self-awareness give us. Reflection on death is a shared concept throughout human history. This work draws from two such traditions, the Buddhist meditation Maranasati "mindfulness of death" and the Western visual tradition of Memento Mori "remember that you must die."

Maranasati invites one to visualize and contemplate their body in a state of decay. In this series, I use an alternative photographic process known as Mordançage to externalize this visualization. Photography has long been associated with memory and the desire to immortalize past moments and serves as constant reminders of time and mortality. Whereas the goal of most photography is the preservation of self and memory, in this work, the fragmented image serves as a reminder of the ever-present specter of the end of the life we know.

The mordançage process degrades and disrupts photographic materials through a chemical process of decay and destruction. The cracked surfaces and emulsion veils, weighted down by gravity, visually reference collapse and entropy and reflect the material conditions of the human body. The figure's skin pulls away, merging with the background, breaking down the barrier between body and space. The forms, textures, and colors of the images simultaneously reference geological formations and flesh, tying the body to the world in which it exists and to which it shall return. www.kristofferjohnsonfoto.com

Victoria Kosel

Victoria Kosel

Dana Stirling

Woven Topographics | Inspired by the imagery of the 1975 New Topographics exhibition, my Woven Topographics series plays with stark, yet fascinatingly beautiful industrial landscapes and explores their striking formal qualities through woven abstraction. Weaving together these compositionally similar locations creates a visual game of compare and contrast, challenging the viewer to decipher the environments for themselves.

Using black and white film, rather than color, removes excess distractions from the striking formal qualities of these locations - the shapes, lines, and space become central to the image. Previously minute features of the photographs are forced out of hiding once woven and framed by the opposing strips. The varying sizes of the woven strips results in yet another challenge as the viewer determines for themselves which image in each set is the most readable. The series presents itself as a visual puzzle as much as an examination of the landscapes presented. www.victoriakosel.com

Shabiha Jafri

Shabiha Jafri

Dana Stirling

My mother's death has left a growing absence in my home and in my heart. Her diagnosis of a grade III brain tumor destroyed her mind and body. Her presence still lingers in small pieces: her bed, her clothes, her photographs. I am desperately trying to latch onto all my memories of her, from the mother I grew up with to the woman who forgot who she was. I am afraid of her disappearing from my mind. This is my attempt to bring her presence back into my life before I forget her. www.shabihajafri.com

Brian Lau

Brian Lau

Dana Stirling

We’re Just Here For the Bad Guys | The May air deluged through his spectral skin, and we remained on the concrete sharing our meager dinner. The horizon billowed into a drab blue the longer we refused to face each other, and the sweat caked to us like dry ash. The lots emptied in a hum, and we chose to continue sitting there, as two lamenting bodies upon the small hill. We continued eating, watching as the engines trekked against the gravel road, lazily drifting off into the black periphery. He wouldn’t look at me, as if being seen was already too much to bear. I didn’t want to get up, and neither did he, as we continued detachedly plucking at the fried skin of the chicken within the plastic. We just wanted to watch. This journey had me reaffirm what I wanted, to be a Phantom. To disengage. To relinquish my need to be seen. Eventually, we stayed to admire even the clouds settling into their ephemeral forms, becoming wisps of drifting white paint, and as I looked back at him, I could recognize only the Phantom, and no one else.

My stepmother sent me pictures of his corpse, telling me how he wanted to be burned. His eyes clasped, mouth ajar, my father’s dangly body in a suit far too large for his twig bones now.

When we burned incense at a temple, a wafting ash smell had arose that reminded me of the air that made me sick those months I was with him. In the following summer after the Phantom’s End, the air was tainted in that smell, the city became imperceptible, and I felt sick again. All I remember now is how that summer ended in an ash sky. brianvanlau.com

Emily Larsen

Emily Larsen

Dana Stirling

Beastly | Beastly considers how removed we have become from our natural selves and connection to our base animalism. Larsen felt this powerfully after giving birth for the first time. Having just gone through arguably one of the processes that we share most closely with our beastly brethren she felt disjoint between what was happening to her body and what the medical crew was demanding of her.

After researching the history of modern birthing practices she was not surprised to learn that what we have come to understand as normal and good birthing practices actually came about through a desire by a blossoming medical field to discredit and undermine the powerfully effective midwives and return that power to men with medical training. As a result, birthing has warped away from the best natural approach to an incredibly intense and traumatic event to the best approach deemed by a for-profit medical system by men trained by a field that mostly studies the bodies of men. We cling to our superiority to animals, but the things we exalt in ourselves are relatively trivial when compared to the things we share.

In beastly Larsen creates still lives of fabricated flora and fauna with living plants and images she took of taxidermied beasts at the Museum of Natural History. Contemplating the absurd way in which we simultaneously idolize and fetishize nature, despite our deep need to distinguish ourselves from it. www.emilyroselarsen.com

Kelia Ideishi

Kelia Ideishi

Dana Stirling

8/5/21 - 8/15/21 | This is a series of photographs taken over a period of 10 days where my partner and I, in a new relationship, both contracted breakthrough covid infections. Confined to our illness in a one bedroom apartment, we lost our sense of smell but learned true love. These photographs serve as a recollection of intimacy and love in a time of mystery, frailty, and uncertainty.

We slept and sweat in the same sheets for those ten days. Drank cups of water and tea, slept, showered, ate strange meals, slept, kissed, showered, cried.

The tenants beneath knew us by our footsteps and the way the furniture moved under us. I wore the same dress everyday, stained the same dress, and cleaned it repeatedly. We sat on my fire escape desperately wishing we could be with those walking beneath us but also not wanting our time to end.

I fell in love
And lost my senses
Literally.
I don’t quite fully understand it, But I also don’t want to know the precise reason why.
It’s better to leave it unknown. www.keliaideishi.com

Maren Klemp

Maren Klemp

Dana Stirling

KINGDOM PLANTAE | The symbolism of flowers has been present in art for centuries. Shakespeare used flowers to convey different emotions in his work, and painters used flowers to convey messages about the subjects in their paintings. Botanics has also played an important role in religious art and rituals, and the meaning of the flower often varies from one religion to another.

With this series I wanted to explore the different symbols each flower represents, and how people, in this case a little girl, interacts with them. I made all the costumes myself, and each dress compliments a specific flower. I painted the «flower dust» with gouache paint, scanned the painting and added it digitally to the image in Photoshop. www.marenklempart.com

Austin Cullen

Austin Cullen

Dana Stirling

A Natural History (Built to be Seen) | A Natural History (Built to be Seen), is a photographic exploration of the natural world, and the various ways it’s constructed and presented by humans. As someone who really values natural history and museums, I've always been interested in the history of natural history, and how it’s both molded and displayed people's understanding of the larger natural world. With this in mind, I wanted to understand the relationship between natural history museums and the American landscape, so I could understand the ways in which they affect one another.

The photographs contrast and draw connections between the interior spaces of natural history museums, with exterior spaces, like national parks and scenic viewpoints. By relating the microcosm of natural history museums, to the macrocosm of the larger American landscape, the cultural biases and at times absurd expectations of what is “natural” comes to the forefront of my work. www.austincullen.com

Rosie Clements

Rosie Clements

Dana Stirling

Rosie is a visual artist currently based in Tucson, Arizona. Her photography has appeared in Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, and on the cover of a bestselling romance novel. She also works in ceramics and writes music.
The images in 'Far Between' immortalize the minute details of the spaces we inhabit. In her work, Rosie expresses both a reverent admiration and a playful curiosity for everyday objects and scenes, and their ability to reflect our own intricacies. roseclementsphoto.com

Isabella Finholdt

Isabella Finholdt

Dana Stirling

Antes de Ir (2018 - Current) | It's been 21 years living in the same place (with some intermittence and changes) and for 3 years ago, I started to photograph it more intensely: “Antes de Ir” is an photo project that I started in 2018 - although I had already photographed the place where I live before - and which I have deepened as an imagery researcher over the years. The interest in documenting the place I live came from the desire to study the portrait in practice and from the reflection on the imagery of the “central” city (to which I used to went every day, by public transport or bicycle for 10 years) and the imagery that if they have from peripheral and distant areas, their landscapes, and consequently of their inhabitants.

The policy to promote social housing in Brazil started in the Vargas era, appears through modernist buildings from the Retirement and Pension Institutes (IAPs) to the notorious BNH, INOCOOP, CDHUS, COHABS and other residential complexes. Miles from urban centers and often built without good architectural planning, many social housing comples have become synonymous with isolation in the so-called “sleeping cities”. Between 1981 and 1982, on a area of 115,285.40 m², which used to belonging to the Pinheiros Institute in the municipality of Taboão da Serra, São Paulo, another social housing project was built; the third in the area that has two more large residential groups nearby.

“Vale dos Pinheiros”, is known to this day by many of its residents and regulars as “Jaú” and was for a long time one of the largest housing complexes in Greater São Paulo. There are countless neighbors, friends, acquaintances and colleagues; children run and cycle from one block to another, or spend their days playing on the court and in the playground. The older ones sunbathe in the early morning or late afternoon, others walk through the immense space and teenagers take the opportunity to escape from prying eyes looking for more discreet corners in the immense space. Forty-one blocks and thirty-two apartments in each, 7560 residents: so many lives and stories, impossible to calculate, as well as embracing its thousand images and facets. I slowly understood that documenting the condominium had much less to do with a “photographic catalog” of the people and the place (as I did at the beginning, in an attempt to photograph most of the almost 7,000 residents), and more to do with me, with my relationship with the place where I grew up (but for the last 10 years spend little time in it) and transition to adulthood. During the development of the work and with covid-pandemic (that made me stay at home for a long time) a deeper interest in children, teenagers and young people and reflections on my own childhood and youth grew, and in a natural way the project moves towards this focus.

Photographing my neighbors – mostly girls and young people – one and two generations younger than mine – is a way of looking back at my own adolescence. No wonder that identification came naturally; being together with them, talking, listening and sharing stories, playing, running, laughing, playing made me see how dear childhood, youth and its phases are to me. I understood, looking more closely at children and adolescents and their universe, that I also "see myself" again realizing the obvious: we carry, throughout adult life, intrinsic issues of that time, and the construction of our identity - and certain conditionings that accompany – it is deeply rooted in the place where we grew up. What then comes to guide the essay is the transition between childhood, youth and adulthood, the loss of a certain innocence and an allowance for enchantment, and these movements over time. An eagerness, an energy, a restlessness and the things of life taken "to the heart", a bit of what dwells in me that I find in my youth and that through them persists in me. www.isabellafinholdt.com

Sylwia Kowalczyk

Sylwia Kowalczyk

Dana Stirling

Metamorphoses | Metamorphoses is inspired by Ovid’s epic poem about legendary transformations, that Nathalie Haynes considers ’the greatest of all compendia of myths’. Just like the myths, the images are unfurling each new image from the last (which is also important to know because I'm working again with my own photographic archive here - images are printed and assembled at the studio and then rephotographed). I’m doing my best to keep the form expressive because as in this ancient poetry as well as in contemporary life nothing is stable, everything is contingent, it all fluctuates and is always on the move. www.sylwiakowalczyk.com

Denis Zezyukin

Denis Zezyukin

Dana Stirling

Stary Oskol is a Russian provincial town located in Belgorod region, south-west of the Central Federal District. It was founded in the 16th century as a fortress to defend the southern borders of Russian lands against the raids of the Tatars. During the Second World War, the town survived German occupation, and in the 1960-70s it became the industrial center of the region as active iron-ore mining began in its vicinities. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic crisis of the 1990s did not affect the industrial status of the city: today it is still considered the metallurgical center of the region.

The streets of Oskol are a combination of urban planning templates from different time periods: the Soviet-era microdistricts designed to strict standards coexist with the private sector and some modern housing developments. There are vast undeveloped spaces between residential areas occupied mostly by wastelands, locker buildings and unstructured technical communications facilities.

Stary Oskol is an example of modern Russia’s architectural eclecticism, a generalized image of a typical Russian city. Mass urbanization, which was implemented in the USSR, equalized the architectural appearance of residential areas. The need to build a lot under pressure of time, with bureaucracy and limited resources, prioritized practicality at the expense of architectural merit. At the end of the 20th century, the socialist ideas that formed the urban environment were replaced by capitalist principles. While new era vacated the street space for private ownership and entrepreneurial ambitions, it still inherited the Soviet way of thinking. Economy and generic solutions migrated from one ideology to another, reflecting on the urban planning system across the country. zeziukin.com

Melissa Borman

Melissa Borman

Dana Stirling

Birds | In the winter of 2020, as I was preparing for a spring show (eventually canceled), I made a photograph of a little ceramic bird in my studio. I had picked up the figurine at a thrift store with the intention of breaking it to use the pieces in an installation. I thought preserving the figurine's elegant form in a photograph would make the act of destruction easier. I was wrong.

The enlarged image made a poorly re-glued flower petal more visible and the little bird even more endearing. I couldn’t bring myself to break it. Instead, I added more well-worn ceramic birds to my collection and spent the grey days of January photographing them.

Little did I know that the solitude of winter would last throughout 2020 and beyond. That May, my mother passed away the same week George Floyd was murdered just a few miles from my home. I inherited my mother’s collection of bird figurines and the project evolved. Selecting backdrops and arranging the figurines became a meditation on individual as well as collective grief.

Showing chipped beaks, a missing eye, or a broken tail, Birds is about the fragile things we love and treasure. We make space for them, we care for them, and yet more often than not someone will find them neglected or damaged despite our good intentions. The work asserts that they, like so many imperfect and once abandoned things, are worthy of care and attention. www.melissaborman.com

Elisa Moro

Elisa Moro

Dana Stirling

DISENTANGLE | In quantum physics with entanglement is described the phenomenon that invisibly binds two very distant particles, in such a strong way that when one is stimulated the other, albeit distant, is consequently perturbed. Entanglement literally means "intertwining" and describes the hidden link between two objects in space and time. This phenomenon seems to tell us about the nature of blood relationships and memory: a space in which, against all logic, images of different times and spaces manage to coexist and coexist, in an intertwining of impulses that, although atomic, they are made of matter that travels in the form of mental images and shapes our identity.

This project is a journey in my memory in search of what I lost about my mother when depression engulfed her and took me with her. It speaks of detachment, of the pain of growing up, of getting to where everything is started and hopefully can finish. A way to separate her struggle from mine. Understanding who we are means chasing the perhaps impossible and interminable attempt to untangle (“disentangle”) the threads that have been intertwined by retracing our images. elisam.myportfolio.com

Daniella DiCarlo

Daniella DiCarlo

Dana Stirling

The Smallest Dandelion | The Smallest Dandelion is a reflection of the past and present. It’s a narrative that expresses the conflicting feelings that are coming of age while also dealing with mental illness. The once beautiful world— full of desolate landscapes and a distant subject. I use my cousin as my muse to express these unprocessed feelings of depression and loneliness that I experienced as a middle schooler.

They say sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never harm you— I always thought they hurt so much more. My cuts healed and scarred, but my mental wounds would forever haunt me. There were words from everyone and everything; the world just seemed a lot meaner as a 13 year old then it had been when I was more compliant. This, on top of other things, led me to start struggling with my mental health.

I started The Smallest Dandelion project in 2019 when I was 21. I had just started going back to therapy and my little cousin had just turned 11; she and I had always been close. I was still trying to process the trauma that I experienced when I was her age; even as an adult I still had a fire burning inside myself for the way people had treated me and the way I had treated myself. It was apparent to myself that when I looked at her all I could seem to do was reflect on how it had all made me feel. So I let myself try to process those feelings and accept the person that I once was.

Dandelion is a metaphor that I use often, that refers to the resilience of someone who feels like they do not belong. The smallest dandelion may be small, but she is nothing to underestimate. She isn’t a fully grown dandelion, but there exists a resilience in her as it does in all dandelions— there exists the same resilience in myself that I see in her. Now, as a stronger dandelion with deeper colors, I stare alone in the mirror; even though it has been years, even though I’m almost entirely over her, in the deep reflection of the soccer fields, I see the smallest dandelion inside every little girl running through that patchy grass and white clover. When I stare into their eyes the reflection in their expressions look much like my own. I see the little dandelion I once was and I give myself a second chance. danielladicarlo.squarespace.com

Valerio Polici

Valerio Polici

Dana Stirling

Interno | The initial reflection for this project started from the age-old debate on the relationship between image and word, questioning the possibility of creating a body of work that was not subject to a script. I therefore began to collect images, allowing my eye to move freely while maintaining a certain rigour, both in terms of composition and space.

Each photo is taken indoors, hence the title, out of a personal obsession with the concept of the home as a psychic rather than architectural artefact. In the drafting of the narrative fabric, I looked for links that are not immediately comprehensible and that bring out something unresolved, a certain tension. The result is an open work that does not need an instruction booklet but invites contemplation. www.valeriopolici.com

Pierre Folk

Pierre Folk

Dana Stirling

By the Silent Line | As an odd reminiscence, all across Europe stand vestiges of its Industrial Revolution. During the 18th century, as population kept on increasing, new techniques were developed to produce more, faster and at a lower cost. This wave of radical changes culminated in the development of railways, which gave a strong impulse to the entire economy by reducing distances. One of greatest vestiges – however unknown – of the Industrial Revolution lies in Paris. La Petite Ceinture is a dormant railroad track, a 32km path surrounding the city of light. Its construction, seen as an invitation to progress, was decided in 1852 by Napoleon III. Traffic reached its apogee with the Universal Exhibition featuring the Eiffel Tower in 1901. However, its operation wouldn’t survive the automobile revolution, nor the advent of the underground system. Indeed, urban passenger service discontinued from 1934. Oddly enough, it hasn’t gone to wrack and ruin as the infrastructure has been maintained in condition. As a river, its shores constantly change over time, but it persists. Grasses, flowers and small trees sprout from its bed. The vestige has become a boundary on the fringe of society. An intimate place, where past and modernity make their acquaintance.

Mankind has influence on its own territory in many ways. Human actions such as technical paradigm shifts, or urban tissue redesign, transform our surroundings. As by-products of these transformations, residual spaces can be found in the interstices of our habitat. These are generally qualified by society as wastelands. Indeed, to rational & functional minds, residual spaces appear as wasted and as an inevitable parasites to useful and organized ones. There is however, in this ephemeral state and in the uncertainty of its outcome, an unusual poetry. To that purpose, By the silent line focuses on a metropolitan scar carrying history: la Petite Ceinture.

This long-term project is a way of maintaining the memory of a landmark and to give thought to our ability to constantly question, reconsider and transform our territory. www.pierrefolk.com

Nikos Papangelis

Nikos Papangelis

Dana Stirling

Daedalus (against walls) | Daedalus was imprisoned by king Minos in the Labyrinth - a maze that he himself had built by order of the king. But the legendary architect later managed to find an exit from the Labyrinth and flew away.

This body of work is an attempt to map my emotional world - an attempt which accompanied from the very beginning the psychoanalytic sessions I started attending in 2015 in order to deal with my anxiety. Over time, the process of recognizing certain patterns in my stories, memories, fantasies and my dreams has offered me a unique perspective; it has been truly fascinating to explore the mysterious ways in which these parallel realities are being interconnected.

I soon started facing these realities, along with my personal fears and the conflicts lying behind my angst, as substantial yet separate fractions of what I have been calling “myself”; they seemed to compound a familiar complex network that I have been tirelessly building up for many years. Nonetheless, the more I realized the extent to which I have been trapped in this involute construction, the more I wanted to break free. This triggered a strong desire to discover what’s outside of this deceitful structure; I wanted to discern the form of the orderless chaos that comes with the freedom I have been seeking after - I thought that it was about time to confront it or even manage to embrace it. nikospapangelis.com

Renato Silva

Renato Silva

Dana Stirling

The end of the line | The end of the line is a personal interpretation of Berlin’s city edges.

I’ve been wanting to somehow do a portrait of this city for quite some time, after a couple of years of my arrival. I was not sure what or how. The city Center was not so appealing as it was extensively photographed already. So one day I had this idea of letting the trains define my Berlin borders.

The project was born in the Winter of 2012 with the aim to investigate and document the surroundings of the big metropolitan area of Germany’s capital. Setting this as the main goal I then decided to ride until the last stations of the main subway network, the U and S lines. These would take me sometimes really far to towns such as Strausberg or Bernau, which are mostly unfamiliar to people that live within the central area.

Once there, I would stay hours, days or even weeks having the difficult but rewarding job of registering what in my perspective was important to build such a body of work. The unpredictability is the big and main responsible for the next image that I was to create, turning left or right is sometimes a big and demanding question for a photographer who’s ambition is the old tradition of discovering and shooting the unknown.

The photographic approach aims to combine the documentary with portraiture, and other visual elements collected over the course of this project. The highlights and key elements of this extensive effort are, offering alternative perspectives and reporting on these unnoted places.

There are not many reasons to be interested in the suburban area of Berlin, maybe to start a family and buy a house, mainly because you can’t afford a bigger place in the city anymore, or it’s Summertime and people just want to go to a lake.

My work started of pure curiosity. How does Berlin really look like? Berlin is huge and for a big part is made of little villages that came together, that’s why sometimes in some neighborhoods you have the feeling that you’re not in a city anymore. The main difference is that most of people are more open and used to foreigners as opposed to the outskirts where Berlin is not a Melting Pot anymore and prejudice and racism goes hand in hand. filhoun1co.wixsite.com/theendoftheline

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