RemiJin Camping

RemiJin Camping

Dana Stirling

A Mother’s Love | This series opens up the cabinets and dusts off the things my Mother has given me throughout the years. Born out frustration, these unused items morphed from something mostly forgotten in storage, to an appreciation for the meaning of inheritance and legacy with which the items were given. My Mother was rarely ever physically in my life or involved with my upbringing, but she to this day sends me boxes of items as her way of taking care of me. This was a cathartic process of documenting how the items are being stored, to then making them my own by way of freeform shape creation.

Each image was photographed on 4x5 Kodak Ektar color film, sometimes from 20 feet off the ground. www.remijin.com

Jesse Ryan Crosby

Jesse Ryan Crosby

Dana Stirling

My personal project, and forthcoming self-published photographic book, “Unlocking Hope,” has been made over the course of ten years, and to this day, it stands as one of the most intimate confessionals I’ve ever produced. It is an on-going self-documentarian style of photographic work, complimented with excerpts of my spoken word poetry, and deep-seated writings, interwoven with selected self-portraiture. Throughout this project, I am also working with, and pairing imagery together as both diptychs and triptychs, both thematically and contextually. I am intrigued by how these working methods, both photographically and linguistically, allow for an alternative dialogue to unfold; one that differs from that of what the singular image can bring forth.
I have used photographic media to explore my relationship to my corporeal, my emotionality, and my innate sense of self, in coming to understand myself as a non-binary individual throughout my coming of age. My work invites the viewer toward a deep disclosure of emotional transparency, and a breadth of perseverance, through documentation of my lived experience. Turning the lens inward, I am able to hold space for myself; conveying my story of becoming, and the willingness to see, and accept myself, as I am. This work is titled “Unlocking Hope,” for a reason, and that’s simply because, hope whispers, “You are a light in a dark room.” www.jesseryancrosbyphotography.com

Caleb Cole

Caleb Cole

Dana Stirling

My work addresses the opportunities and difficulties of queer belonging, as well as aims to be a link in the creation of that tradition, no matter how fragile or ephemeral or impossible its connections. Recontextualizing and transforming secondhand objects (such as clothing, blankets, dolls, and found photographs) as well as popular media connects with a queer tradition of refashioning a world that was not made for us, refusing given meanings in favor of ones that more closely align with our lived experiences. The search for these items is a kind of cruising, that desire itself entwined with the resulting work, and taking objects home to tend to them is an expression of extended witnessing and devotion.

Using methods such as collage, assemblage, photography, and video, I bring images and objects together for chance encounters, deliberately placing materials from different time periods into conversation with one another, as a means of thinking about a lineage of queer culture while resisting a singular progressive genealogy. My work acknowledges the impossibility and undesirability of returning to the past, and instead experiences the act of looking backward as a way to imagine beyond the present to new queer futures. www.calebxcole.com

Alayna N Pernell

Alayna N Pernell

Dana Stirling

My practice considers the gravity of the mental wellbeing of Black people in relation to the spaces we inhabit, whether physically or metaphorically. In my interdisciplinary practice, I examine the harsh realities and complexities of being a Black American. As a product of Alabama, it was evident that the color of my skin alone was more offensive than any words I could say. The very possession of my Black body alone served to be quite traumatic. It shaped the person who I am today. It wasn’t until I reached adolescence, that I realized that I was far from being alone. There is a wear and tear on the Black body as a result of stress due to constant exposure to racism, sexism, and classism. This weathering affects generations, not individuals. Photography is often used as a tool to silence or mischaracterize marginalized people. This is why it is important to me in my photographic practice to consider the realities of others with compassion and respect. In each body of work I create, I attempt to create a space for healthy dialogue to occur.

Currently, my practice is revolving around two questions: 1) What can visual art tell us about the depiction of Black women throughout history, and 2) How have those negative depictions of Black women resulted in our lack of mental and physical care? I have spent months researching and uncovering suppressed images of Black women held in photographic collections at the Art Institute of Chicago. The images I have found and researched thus far depict the exploitation and violence towards Black women. In my practice, I have excavated, re-photographed, re-captioned, and re-contextualized the original works. By engaging with these images with the intervention of my hands and my body, I attempt to rescue and protect Black women’s bodies and their humanity, and also unearth their stories so that they can be seen and heard. With my ongoing body of work entitled Our Mothers’ Gardens, I beg for more than the visibility of Black women in institutional collections and hopeful reparations. I also desire for the issue around institutions holding and silencing collections of visible and (in)visible violent visual depictions of Black women to be further highlighted and appropriately corrected.

Early in my research, a part of my work critiqued Peter J. Cohen’s collection focusing on why he was listed as the photographer and owner of specific works held at the Art Institute of Chicago. After communicating with him personally and advocating for the change of ownership at the AIC, I was given permission to restore the images back to their original owners. I am in a unique position in my practice where I am beginning restorative photographic justice work. I was sent 20 images from his personal collection in order to research and analyze the images with the information provided on the back of the images. While I am documenting my restorative justice work, I am also showing that restitution is possible and vital, especially in communities of color. www.alaynanpernell.com

Karen Rothdeutsch

Karen Rothdeutsch

Dana Stirling

Here and Now | Growing old is something that I’ve always thought about with trepidation. The future is intimidating, the thought of the uncertain journey that lies ahead is unsettling. I often find myself reminiscing about my past to distract myself from thinking of what the future may hold. I am afraid of the loss that comes with the progression of time; the loss of my most treasured memories, and of my loved ones.

Here and Now is my personal exploration into the relationship between memories and the aging process. I have been making connections with individuals who are generations older than I am, and discovering how they appreciate the memories they have made in their lives without dwelling on the past in a way that prevents them from truly living in the present. This is my attempt at understanding the roots of my fears related to aging, so that I may begin to overcome them. karenrothdeutsch.myportfolio.com

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

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