In her mysterious monochromatic photographs, Jing Lin reconstructs a familiar world that no one has been to. Her background in motion pictures informs her current work. As a graduate photography student at Academy of Art University, she worked with multiple darkroom techniques in traditional and alternative printing processes. She blurs the edge between photography and painting through the use of experimental processes. Solitary, Jing’s most recent body of work, in which she is portraying a nonexistent place to examine the theme of self-confinement. Constantly, she explores photography with these questions in mind: What did I see? What did I not see? Chinese, b. 1993, Chengdu, China, based in San Francisco, USA. https://www.jinglinphotography.com
Dr. Benjamin Erlandson is a perpetual skeptic, longitudinal thinker, brewer, gardener, photographer, learning systems designer, and writer of fiction and nonfiction. Combinations of his efforts often manifest as technology, visual media, and printable narrative. Having tried nearly every platter on the capitalist corporate industrial buffet, he’s just not found anything to his liking. He spends quite a bit of time in the mountains and rivers instead. Mostly on foot. Dr. Erlandson has published extensively in academia, including several peer-reviewed articles and co-authorship of the graduate-level textbook Design For Learning In Virtual Worlds. He has self-published the narrative nonfiction work Winter South 02014, about a road trip from California back to his home state of North Carolina. With another nonfiction project in the works, he switches gears between fiction, nonfiction, and photography to keep his mind limber. He’s been shooting for more than twenty-five years and writing creatively for more than thirty. Born and raised in Elkin, North Carolina, Ben has degrees from UNC-Asheville, Emerson College, and Arizona State University, and has lived and worked in Asheville, Boston, Tempe, Monterey Bay, Berkeley, and Washington, DC. He currently resides in Glade Valley, North Carolina, and hopes to build an ecological homestead, or just travel around the North American continent on foot, bicycle, and touring kayak, practicing photography and telling stories.
A native of the Pacific Northwest, Rodrigo began his excursions into the forests, mountains and coast as an exercise in philosophical contemplation. Spending time alone in the wilds turned from a therapeutic endeavor into a passion for capturing the unique moments he saw. An avid reader and student of philosophy, Rodrigo derives much of his inspiration from the works of the ancient Stoics and Epicureans. He is obsessed with the flow of time and themes of change, impermanence, life death & rebirth, and tranquility. As a father of three young children, he has a daily reminder of the incredibly rapid flow of time and the incessant change deep inside each of us.
Terry Wright is an artist and writer who lives in Little Rock. His art has been featured widely in print and digital venues, including “Chaleur Magazine,” “Glassworks,” “Queen Mob’s Tea House,” “Riddled with Arrows,” “Sliver of Stone,” “Third Wednesday,” and “USA Today.” Exhibitions include the 57th Annual Delta Exhibition. More work on view at cruelanimal.com.
Steve is a graduate of the fine arts program at Illinois Central College, East Peoria, Illinois. He received his B. A. at the University of Illinois and is a juried Illinois Artisan through the Illinois State Museum Society. During his 35-year professional working career, he was a photographer, writer, graphic designer, and media relations specialist. Thirty-two of his 35 years were spent in the healthcare field where he was an on-call medical/surgical photographer, generalist photographer, researcher, and executive ghostwriter. He has received numerous awards for photography and publications. “I am a regionalist. I photograph the everyday – the familiar in unfamiliar places -traveling back roads across rural landscapes visiting towns and meeting folks along the way,” said Wilson. “This is where my heart lives. I am attracted to the simplest elements of color and design, the ironic, sometimes nostalgic, documenting structures and places, and often given to futile attempts to capture purely emotional visual inclinations. Dorothea Lange said, “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” That has held true. With each image, I discover a little more about me. I feel myself moving toward something; an understanding, a refinement.”
Michael Hower is a photographer from Central Pennsylvania where he resides with his wife and two boys. His experience with digital photography began five years ago. Over that time, he has amassed a resume of over a hundred exhibitions and publications. His work has been featured in shows at the Pennsylvania State Museum, PA; Biggs Museum of Art, DE; Masur Museum of Art, LA; Marshall University, WV; and the Fitton Center for Creative Arts, OH. He had a solo show this past fall at the Rehoboth Art League entitled “Abandoned Places.” This series of photographs examines the abandoned prison cells of Eastern State Penitentiary. The Penitentiary subscribed to a theory of rehabilitation that proscribed confinement and a lack of interaction with other inmates. This ran counter to the prevailing system in the United States at the time where harsh physical punishment was the norm. Ideas of church and religious experience are embodied in the building and served as a guide for how prisoners should be rehabilitated: hallways looked like that of a church; low doorways required one to bow, seek penance from a greater power; a single small skylight lit each cell, a proverbial “eye of God.”
Featuring: This issue features stimulating and provocative works of poetry, flash fiction, short nonfiction, and photography by Anne Alexander, Tobi Alfier, Michael Baldwin, Walter Bargen, Heath Brougher, Rita Ciresi, Ben Erlandson, Rodrigo Etcheto, Phil Gallos, Duane L Herrmann, Heidi A. Howell, James Croal Jackson, Jing Lin, Sean Murphy, Sheree La Puma, Robert Perchan , Andy Posner, Michael Karl Ritchie, Sandy Robertson, Gerard Sarnat, Mark Stein, Paul Tarragó, Alison Terjek, Shannon Thrace , Stephen Curtis Wilson, Terry Wright.
