Alison has found a way to soothe her pandemic blues by bringing together the limitations of her current moment with the freedom of former ones, chock full of warm feeling, fond memories, and simpler times. I admired her DIY aesthetic of sharing these photographic memories, casually taped and pinned in her everyday environment. Their humor does not belie the poignancy of the wanting and longing that we all feel right now. In a sea of photographers looking at their pandemic lives, Alison delivers something fresh, relatable, and exquisite.

I think the artist’s way of presentation is brilliant, where people’s lives of the present and old days in a small village are combined through the images of needlework of women. The artist adds a quality of handmade craft to her photographs which vividly shows the movements and acts of the women in the community. The work sheds light on the history of the village women which have been easily forgotten in the official record.

I found Hauksdóttir’s distinctive, beautifully evocative series of fragmented landscapes to be one of the most cohesive series submitted. Their sculptural forms slowly and quietly revealed themselves. They are timeless, intriguing, mysterious, subtle and contemplative.

Diego Moreno’s series Malignant Influences would not leave me alone. I kept on returning to the series because I did not understand what was happening but it left a kind of screen burn on my mind. Not understanding and curiosity led to a nightmarish door, an invitation to think on what both disturbed and attracted me. On each return to the work I was taken on a different journey as the images unlocked the push and pull of the unconscious and they evoked feelings I will or can never fully understand. Within this work we see a dark storm, and its brilliance as a series is that it offers us no sense of security in that which is most sacred, the family.

In this hybrid photography work, the Greek artist Ioanna Sakellaki incorporates a new kind of subjectivity, intimacy, and criticism about death and loss. Perfectly merging performance and staged emotions, Ioanna has developed and broadened the language of photography as she reflects about memory, religion and mythology. “The Truth is in the Soil” is a dense and moving body of work: a deep contribution to the collection of tales of human struggle for meaning. She shows a broad emotional range, with pain, loss, empathy and beauty side by side.

I was drawn to Karen Navarro’s work because of the dialogue it encourages between the subjects, the artist, and the audience. The sculptural and collage elements of the work allow for the reimagining of each piece-- they can be observed from different viewpoints, as well as reassembled. The palettes, large scale, and use of hashtags also provoke questions about representation and categorization. We are asked to consider who informs these decisions and which social constructs are at work in the process.

Kira Krász describes her work as “focused on the interplay between images and their physical properties.” The layered and roughly assembled qualities of this piece underscore this aspect of her practice, while also stretching to accommodate and describe the unique psychological spaces that many of us have grappled with over the course of the pandemic. The artist depicts herself and her partner in multiple, varied poses; each figure is printed on separate pieces of recycled paper that mimic the blocky, modular shapes familiar to anyone who has played the video game Tetris. Tightly stacked together at the bottom of the image, these interlocking figures evoke a question increasingly relevant to life under lockdown, namely: how does one occupy a prescribed amount of space in relation to another body, another self, over a prolonged period of time? Squaring each other to fit as the space will be tiny the days will be long is a compelling and lyrical meditation on the ongoing negotiation between intimacy and autonomy; fitting together and friction.

The work of photographer Hal stirs contradictory emotions. On one side the claustrophobic aspect of the set-up (people, families, couples, huddled together in a forced plastic-wrap embrace, together with their homes and cars) creates a sense of anxiety and surprise. Surprise which is immediately overtaken by awe in front of such ingenuous, complex and time-consuming installation. On the other hand, hinted by the title and the artist’s words, we can relax and re-interpret the scene as a symbolic representation of the connection between human beings. We are connected by love (represented by the embrace) and the interconnection expands to all and everything around us (the wrapping effect), and we are thus gifted with a simple and straightforward message of optimism that entails covering everything with love (and thus living in a better world). Furthermore, considering the times we are living, the embrace and the plastic, carry an additional, unintended meaning, reflecting our craving for hugging and touching, which have become so scarce in COVID times.

Kawecki’s photographs from his childhood home is a touching body of work of the presence and absence of his beloved grandmother. He describes the portraits he takes of her as a collective work, his and hers together and they blossom with feelings of love, nostalgia but also sadness. The combination of a strong personal story and beautiful photographs is something that I find deeply touching.

I was taken by the mysterious and evocative art works by Weiye Su when I first saw them, and they continue to exude their charms with repeated viewing. I like the fusion of the minimal, almost primitive, technique of pinhole photography with collage and digital drawing. The test strips of pinhole prints included in the collage are muddied with chemicals and light leaks, calling to mind cosmic storms, ancient mountains, volcanic eruptions and the wild power of nature.