In Silver and Earth // on View at C + C Gallery, Baltimore, MD // through May 28th, 2025
"In Silver and Earth is a new exhibit of photographic works by Jonna McKone and Elena Volkova, which emphasizes both artists’ exploration of unique materials and processes. Silver, the foundation of traditional photographic practice, and earth, a marker of place and history, serve as essential elements in crafting their imagery. These materials ground their work in both the tangible and symbolic, highlighting delicate landscapes and portraits.
Within several ongoing bodies of work, Jonna McKone and Elena Volkova explore the intersections of time, memory, and history through distinct but resonant photographic practices. Both artists employ slow, meticulous processes to interrogate place and identity, but they offer us new opportunities to consider the medium of photography through their use of site-specific materials or playing with slowing down time in a medium built on fractions of a second.
While these bodies of work were started prior to the most recent presidential election in the USA, the context of our country’s political chaos and erasure is shaping these bodies of work into sharp political statements. In McKone’s “Slow Drift” series, she traces the landscape of former plantations in Maryland, where centuries of enslaved people labored, a history that the Trump administration appears determined to erase. Volkova’s wet collodion portrait series of Ukrainian refugees in Germany in 2003 humanizes the war in Ukraine, one individual at a time, showing us the people victimized by Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, a story that has also become intentionally blurred by a president whose actions now support Russian interests.
Viewed together, McKone and Volkova reframe traditional modes of seeing, offering gorgeous and lyrical works that blur boundaries between past and present, land and body, resilience and impermanence. McKone’s delicate landscapes and nuanced explorations of human interaction with nature remind us of the enduring imprint of the past, while Volkova’s quiet moments of stillness in everyday life and visceral portraits evoke an innate resilience that persists through time. Both artists ask us to witness not just the beauty and fragility of our world, but also the unseen forces that have shaped it—forces that, like memory itself, are often obscured yet undeniable.
Through their collaboration, McKone and Volkova offer an invitation to sit in the quiet tension of these fragile truths, acknowledging the violence and the beauty that emerge when histories are reexamined through new lenses." - Cara Ober
Interview in Bmore Art.
