BmoreArt

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.

Before an artist talk scheduled for Wednesday, April 16 at the gallery (RSVP / More information here), BmoreArt interviewed both artists about their ideas and practice.

BmoreArt: First of all, I am curious why you selected photography as your primary medium, especially since your work is quite experimental at times. 

Elena Volkova: Honestly, I don’t think of photography as a medium any more because it means so many things nowadays.  The technology changed and expanded so much in 180 years that even photographers cannot agree what is photography and what is not.  For me, it’s more of a tool for making, and it’s a discipline. 

Jonna McKone: I came to photography after working in film and video. My early video work explored the edges of the medium of documentary film. My first video, called Yields, took place in a small town in North Carolina near where I went to graduate school.

I started going back and forth to this small agricultural town outside of Durham, NC just as a large, multi-national corporation was preparing its exit. I was interested in visible ruins, invisible failures, and the resilience of the community. After archival research and conducting oral histories, spending time in the community with farmers and business owners, I filmed observational vignettes of people in the wake of the loss–empty office buildings, a grocer cutting a wheel of cheese, a middle aged man carefully vacuuming a motel. The film ultimately was about distance–I was asking why documentary as a form imposes narratives on people and places, in the process flattening complexity.

What it would mean to follow edges and seams without narrative devices? The film is made primarily of rich soundscapes and slow moving frames. 10 years later I think this project still characterizes my ongoing movement across photo and video.

How did photography come into your life?

Elena Volkova: My father was an amateur photographer, and growing up, we developed film and printed black and white pictures together in the bathroom of our tiny Soviet apartment.  When I took my first darkroom class in college, I rediscovered photography’s magic. 

I don’t have a very deep explanation as to why photography, but I can say that when I’m behind the camera, I feel alive.  And perhaps in collective terms, photography is how we both understand reality, but also problematize it (and for me, this is also how I personally disengage from reality and explore something deeper that words cannot capture).

Jonna McKone: Working with my camera is my way of being in the world. My dad, who I was very close with, passed away while I was in graduate school. I made a black and white 16mm film with him – it’s really personal, mostly just about us being together, listening, creating a vessel of moving image that allowed us to just be together. At the time my dad was living in a group house and I was in another state so it was a little hard to find time to spend together.  The last thing I think we taught each other is that images can stand in, where words cannot. I did not have words to process this huge loss in my life. 

After I graduated and came to Baltimore, I found myself increasingly drawn to the stillness of images and controlling time and frames in a way that’s distinct from video. With photography, I can explore the nature of exchange and reciprocity. There’s room for material experimentation, and it offers me the opportunity to spend time in communities that hold perspectives and histories that interest me. 

At Connect + Collect gallery, you are each exhibiting two bodies of work that include personal and collective stories, combining your own ideas and insight with a larger story that incorporates historical events. Can you share some of your ideas behind the work?

Jonna McKone: This is work from two, interlocking projects. “Slow Drift” is an impressionistic series about how former colonial and plantation landscapes in Maryland hold deep memories, a sense of home and environmental damage. The project attempts to make visible the gradual, often invisible, relationships between climate change, identity, and American extraction by focusing on communities, interior spaces, family photographs, and grounds and gardens. 

With a view camera and medium format camera, the project conveys time passing as landscapes, the built environment, vegetation, objects and personal stories that connect to these sites across generations, remain, resist and evolve.

Through a slow process of being in the land, I’m looking for the incremental and overlooked.  The images for the project, which In Silver and Earth contains excerpts of, were made on on  nearby former plantation sites. The ones we see in this exhibit were made on or by Wye House and The Hermitage. I hope these impressions of the land feel reflexive–images that gather and refract, allowing the earth to dictate the terms of its own picturing.

I also have a series of chemigrams–some made on former plantation sites–that explore land and perspective.

Elena Volkova: I would like my work to read as a meditation on a female experience, by juxtaposing two bodies of work, portraits of women and still lives. I think this is a beginning of a larger trajectory of my work.  I am interested in nuances of how everyday moments that are subjective can also be viewed as a collective experience. The portraits in this exhibit come from a current project that I’ve been working on for about three years. 

The women in these photographs are Ukrainians who have been displaced by Russian invasion.  All of them have deep stories, but you can’t tell that from the portraits. 

I am hoping that this body of work comes across as a poetic take on womanhood; I don’t want to portray suffering (neither do the women in these photographs). The “how” and “why” have changed quite a bit since I started this project in 2023. At first, I wanted to document a community of women and children who left their country because of the war.  But women wanted to create portraits that represent their beauty and strength. I was getting requests that at first seemed unusual (for example, nude photos), and it became apparent that embodiment is what is important to women who participate in this project. 

What is important to me is collaboration and being present while making photos together, and to create images where women see themselves and in a way reclaim their sense of self. 

BmoreArt: Both of you are choosing experimental, film, and historic photo processes in an age of digital production. Can you talk about the specific materials and techniques you are using – and cite examples from the show? 

Elena Volkova: I use wet plate collodion, a 19th century process which first was used as an accessible media for social documentary.  When we think about first portraits that were created of the working class, immigrants arriving to the US, soldiers fighting wars, wealth and poverty, cultural and civic leaders–these were created because wet plate was an accessible and relatively inexpensive medium.

First representations of feminine experiences were also created using wet plates – I am thinking about Julia Margaret Cameron and Lady Clementina Hawarden and how their work challenged the conventions of traditional portraiture.

Jonna: I work with film because it slows down my process, creates space for thinking and has limits. I have tried working with digital photos. The process overwhelms me and becomes about ordering and creating a hierarchy of a “good photograph.”

Working with film, there’s a gap between going out in the world and what was made, and then what happens on return to the studio. There’s often a few months between shooting, processing my film, scanning it, and starting to create sequences of the work. I like this gap, it keeps me from editing myself as I go and then once I am working through the images, the choices I make are part of the story of making them. Each roll of film is a kind of journey into a portrait, landscape, or sense of home. 

How do these specific media allow you to think and communicate specifically? How are your ideas realized and consumed, based on the materials and processes you choose?

Elena Volkova: I use wet plate for its slow, deliberate, and unpredictable nature. Because it lacks control and sterility of digital photography, it resonates with that magic that I first fell in love with. I think using a historic process to make portraits now challenges how portraits are created and consumed, and also I hope it adds emotional depth to the portraits.

Jonna McKone: One of my interests right now is photography and the imprint or idexicality. There has been scholarship on this since the days of Walter Benjamin, but basically the question is whether photographic images bear an indexical relationship to reality.

I make chemigrams and prints from soil because I am interested in exploring this relationship — the impression of light, the record of plant leaves on paper, the register of placing dirt over photo paper. There’s the technical process of these imprints and then the artist’s role in the creation.

As someone who is by nature a documentarian, who came of age in between analog and digital technologies, I find the space between record and my own personal relationship in making my chemigrams extremely beautiful and compelling. The land can impart a kind of “truth” and as an artist, I am also making a series of choices that are aesthetic, based on my life history and experience. 

Jonna, what’s your Baltimore story and how does Baltimore shape your ideas and process? 

Jonna McKone: I love having a studio at the Compound, which as a place is a testament to the hard work, community and relationships that help to sustain a life for artists in the city. I have worked with people in a lot of different ways–I was in a band for a short period of time, I have produced several feature films made here in Baltimore, shown my photographs in a range of spaces and settings, and most recently, started a small artist collective gathering work together about climate change. (We recently had a show at Goucher College called Soil to Skin). I have also worked as a producer at WYPR, for film festivals, and have taught at a few different colleges here–a range of things to both get by and that inspire me as a resident of the city. I’m excited for upcoming solo shows as well as a video series I am directing for Art21. 

I feel really lucky to live here and have a community of friends and collaborators who inspire me and shape my work. I really value my friendships and community in Baltimore. There are things that are hard about living here–just surviving making art and films–there are limited opportunities but mostly I feel extraordinarily lucky for the community that’s around me. 

Elena, what is your relationship to Baltimore?

Elena Volkova: Over the years, I have met many people who came to Baltimore temporarily and ended up living here. Even 10 years ago, I had thoughts of living somewhere else, but I don’t anymore, and the major reason for it is people. As a European person, I am still not used to having a lifestyle that does not encourage people to enjoy being outside; there is no sense of architecture and urban design; it’s simply not a priority to people. But, there is a culture that is formed around visiting each other’s houses and spending time in groups; that’s how I met amazing people that are my closest friends. 

I love the creative community in Baltimore and the culture we create together. It took a really long time for me to find a sense of community; definitely over a decade. I would love to live in many different places all over the world, but I cannot imagine starting from scratch in search of “my people.” 

Join us on Wednesday, April 16th, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM at BmoreArt Connect+Collect for an artist talk with Jonna McKone and Elena Volkova. This conversation will explore their distinct yet resonant photographic practices, which examine time, memory, and history through slow, meticulous processes.

RSVP HERE.