In Silver and Earth - Jonna McKone

In Silver and Earth // on View at C + C Gallery, Baltimore, MD // through May 28th, 2025

Photographers Jonna McKone and Elena Volkova explore the intersections of time, memory, and history through distinct but resonant photographic practices. Both artists turn to slow, meticulous processes to interrogate how place and identity are inscribed and reinterpreted through personal and collective experience.

In Silver and Earth reflects the materials central to their practices. Silver, the foundation of traditional photographic processes, 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.

Together, McKone and Volkova reframe traditional modes of seeing, offering 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. - Ines de Lozada Sanchez