Christopher Lowell: The Ark 

“These photographs were made while driving across the country as it was falling apart. My wife and I cooked and slept in fish camps, trailer parks, or on the side of forgotten two-lane highways, winding from the pacific northwest over the Tetons, across the bible belt, toward our home in New York. The welcoming language of road signs and shuttered campsites did little to offset our anxiety, which only increased when my wife learned she was pregnant. Suffering from Hyperemesis Gravidarum, avoiding hospitals for fear of infection, these photographs capture our perilous journey home.” 

Christopher Lowell investigates themes of nostalgia, utopia/dystopia and autobiography in his work, shooting on film and using traditional printing practices to convey the most “honest” interpretation of his photographs. He studied photography at the University of Southern California and the New School for Design.

chrislowellphotography.com

@mrchrislowell

Sandra Klein: Meeting the Shadow

“As I sit in my garden, I watch life become more and more fragmented – the pandemic, politics, issues of race and ethnicity, personal losses, all contribute to an unhinged surrealism. Here in my garden, I understand that the beauty and decay among the verdure serve as a metaphor for this new world.

In this series, I photograph flora in its decayed state, focusing on light and shadow. I then deconstruct the image, leaving only the shadow. I cling to what is ephemeral, meticulously removing the initial subject, having no idea what will remain. Chance takes over and I begin to have a conversation with silhouettes created by the sun. As I cut and sew the photographs so as to create a material object, I’m stitching together what is lost, the fleeting memory of what once was. These fragile efforts portray my psyche during these turbulent times.  

While working on this series, I was reminded of the year I spent working with the artist Betye Saar. To create her collages, she cuts shapes out of paper, only to throw them away. She then uses the scraps in her image making, forcing herself to work in the arena of the unexpected. I know that arena profoundly. There is so much in my life that I have been unprepared for and Meeting the Shadow is a metaphor for becoming comfortable with a future I can’t predict.”

Sandra Klein is an artist whose images, whether captured with a camera or composited, portray a layered world which, though filled with anxiety and trauma, still is rich with joy. She was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey and received a BFA from Tyler School of Fine Art in Philadelphia, Pa and An MA in Printmaking from San Diego State University.  Her images have been shown throughout the United States and Abroad and she has had one person shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography, both the Lishiu and Yixian Festivals in China, Studio Channel Islands, the A Smith Gallery in Texas and Photographic Gallery SMA in San Miguel Allende, Mexico and Atlanta Photography Group.  She was the recipient of the Lorser Feitelson Grant jointly with artist Betye Saar.

She is represented by Photographic Gallery SMA in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and Walker Fine Art Gallery in Denver, Colorado

sandrakleinportfolio.com

@Sandra_Klein_Photography

Brad Ogbonna: Moments of Self-Regard

“In May 2020, I, along with the rest of the world, watched in horror as another black life was plundered by the state. It happened in a town that I called home for the first 20 years of my life - the fear instilled in my youth had been finally and fully realized. 

As anger swept through the nation and protests ensued, I sought refuge away from it all in nature and thus created this series of images. 

Who is allowed freedom? 

A question that stuck with me following the death of George Floyd. At a time when our liberties were being questioned, simply breathing and existing felt like a radical act of defiance.

I didn’t know it at the time but these images were a response to the ideas that I pondered internally and served as my personal protest - encapsulating the moments of grief and respite whilst the world seemed to burn.”

Brad Ogbonna was born and raised in Saint Paul, MN, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. A first generation Nigerian-American and a self-taught photographer, his work focuses on the black experience: his own, as well as the many different iterations he has documented while traveling domestically and abroad as a member of the diaspora. His work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, Forbes, Vogue and the Financial Times, and has collaborated extensively with the artist Kehinde Wiley. In 2019, Ogbonna’s work was featured at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In 2022, the International Center for Photography presented INWARD: Reflections on Interiority, featuring Ogbonna’s photographs of contemporary Nigerian culture photographed in the historic style of West African studio photography.

bradogbonna.com

@bradogbonna

Ryan Frigillana: The Weight of Slumber

“The Weight of Slumber is an exploration of grief as it unfolded during the unprecedented events of 2020. From the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing lockdown, my grief and loneliness were immeasurably compounded by the abrupt end of a near-six-year relationship. Quarantined and faced with the sudden loss of intimacy and physical contact, I began forming a connection with—and harboring an attuned sensitivity to—the immediate spaces and objects around my home. From the smallest insects to the chorus of rain marching down my gutters, from the snow blowing in through my window living and dying on my bed, to the found photographs I obsessively collected—everything seemed to whisper with weighted words. Sought in the heart of all things: a prayer, a song, an embrace. 

Deep in the vacuum of isolation, I yearned for the familiarity of touch, of love and comfort. These images served as vehicles for reconciliation and escape—a simultaneous mirror and compass through grief. Meditations on space, proximity, surface, and ephemerality, recreate the mental landscape of loss and longing I struggled to navigate.”

Ryan Frigillana (b. Iligan City, Philippines) is a New York-based visual artist working with photography and bookmaking. His recent works engage with personal and communal narratives of the Filipino-American diaspora as they relate to themes of faith, migration, and loss. He explores the book’s fluid potential as a container for these interests, often recontextualizing archives from popular media, family, and biblical sources to activate his own images.

Frigillana is the author of two monographs: Visions of Eden (self-published, 2020) and The Weight of Slumber (Penumbra Foundation, 2021). His publications are held in the library collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Morgan Library and Museum, Getty Research Institute, and the Smithsonian among others. Select awards include the MUUS Collection/Penumbra Foundation Risograph Print & Publication Residency (2021), the NYFA/JGS Fellowship for Photography (2021), the En Foco Photography Fellowship (2023), the Aperture & Google Creator Labs Photo Fund (2023), and the Penumbra Workspace Program (2024). He holds a BFA in Photography and Related Media from the Fashion Institute of Technology (2020).

ryanfrigillana.com

@frigggy

Safi Alia Shabaik: PIECES: a pandemic story of self

PIECES: a pandemic story of self is a metaphoric self-portrait that unfolds in a series of crude stop-motion digitally-animated collage vignettes. This work was conceived and created in July 2020 after wading through the first several months of Coronavirus lockdown and struggling with extreme feelings of confinement, isolation, stagnation, and detachment from my own life. 

This work presents a union of two of my practices: collage and experimental video. In 2015, I began playing with movement in my analog collages. This experiment resulted in super crude animation made in the traditional stop-motion style of linking multiple still images together, and bringing them to life as in a film strip or flip book. This is my first piece created almost entirely in the digital sphere. Initially hand-cutting desired collage parts from various publications with scissors, I created each collage vignette in analog form by moving the parts around on a surface to determine their placement. I then scanned the individual parts, and digitally recreated these placements, adding movement between them that culminated in choppy stop-motion animation. The story is my own, as is the text font, which I created by sorting alphabet pasta, hand painting and scanning 473 unique letters and numbers, then digitally animating them to flesh out the full tale without individual pasta repetition. 

The pandemic forced me out of my creative patterns and pushed me to return to a tactile method of creating again. Anatomical deconstruction, reconstruction, identity and transformation are continuous themes in my work. My collages often only exist at the moment in time when all of the loose-leaf parts come together. Once the images are memorialized in-camera, the loose-leaf parts are then disassembled and can once again be reused for future collages. I call these "Transient Collages." There is a metaphor in my process: the loose-leaf parts of the collage themselves mimic the search for identity that I play with in the actual imagery, but these severed parts might never truly find their meaning since only a select few constructions are ever made permanent with adhesive. Instead, these severed loose-leaf parts reinvent themselves through continued metamorphosis of assembly / disassembly / reassembly, much like one's journey of shifting roles and self-definition over the course of a lifetime.

Safi Alia Shabaik, known by her moniker flashbulbfloozy, is a Los Angeles born-and-bred Egyptian-American interdisciplinary artist working in photography, collage, sculpture, and experimental video. She earned her B.A. in Art with honors at UCLA. Under the mentorship of Catherine Opie, she learned the art of large-scale color printing in Opie’s custom-built darkrooms. Upon moving to New York, she became a fashion stylist, photographic documentarian, personal assistant, travel companion and confidante to the legendary Ms. Grace Jones, who gave Safi free rein to photograph her anytime they were together. 

Safi’s work explores daily life, identity, persona, transformation, subculture, and the humanity of all people. Her subject matter spans the body in general, through self, family, street life, and counterculture – people who push their bodies to extremes and challenge societal norms. 

Safi exhibits her work nationally and has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Black+White Photography, Lenscratch, Alta Journal, Catalyst: Interviews, The Advocate, Upworthy.com, Edge Of Humanity, Artillery Magazine, and in Grace Jones’ book: I’ll Never Write My Memoirs. She has been featured on The Candid Frame (episode 465), and her work has earned her recognition in PhotoLucida’s Critical Mass Top 50. In collaboration with the Parkinson’s Foundation, Safi is the proud recipient of a Visual Arts grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to exhibit her most profound body of work, Personality Crash, nationally. She is the first (ever) recipient of the Las Fotos Project Foto Award for Self- Expression, presented by the Photographic Arts Council Los Angeles. Safi is a founding member of the Los Angeles Street Collective. A lover of the human form, the artist is also an award-winning mortician.

flashbulbfloozy.com

@flashbulbfloozy