Cristina Fontsare is a lens based artist working in long term project regarding the cycles of life, growing, metamorphosis and the magic in the everyday life and the ephemeral. 

Her life, the people around her and the land, are the excuse to cast a personal eye on the world.

The Picture belongs to the series: Walk the fog

I am working patiently in this series in the foggy mornings around the place I live. I feel thrown to walk through the fog, to lose myself in the abyss and perhaps find a treasure. That morning, after dropping off my daughter at school, I went into the fields and met Rachel and Lola. They were training for a race.

I never saw them again.

Ash’s work is about their culture and upbringing in Miami. This photo is from a series about the love and humidity of their surroundings.

Raised in the Southern states of Tennessee and Texas, André Ramos-Woodard (they/ them/ he/ him) is a contemporary artist who uses their work to emphasize the experiences of the underrepresented: celebrating the experience of marginalized peoples while accenting the repercussions of contemporary and historical discrimination. Working in a variety of media—including photography, text, and illustration—Ramos-Woodard creates collages that convey ideas of communal and personal identity centralized within internal conflicts. They are influenced by their direct experience with life as being queer and African American, both of which are obvious targets for discrimination. Focusing on Black liberation, queer justice, and the reality of mental health, Ramos-Woodard works to amplify repressed voices and bring power to the people. Ramos-Woodard received their BFA from Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, and their MFA at The University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Tynan Byrne is a photographer and book artist in Quincy, Massachusetts. His bodies of work investigate the relationship between photography and language, magical realism, narrative documentation, and his own development as a queer individual. In his ongoing series, "The Borogoves", he uses limitations of the polaroid to challenge the confines typically bound to the history of photographic landscapes and environments. Referencing the made-up words in Lewis Carol's "The Jabberwocky", he strings together a project lacking concrete context to conjure a world imagined as tones, textures, and whimsy.

b. 1997, New York City,  Joey Solomon's photographs have been featured in The New Yorker, Aperture Gallery and MoMA PS1 among notable others. Solomon’s images serve to advocate for invisible mental highs and lows of the mentally afflicted human experience. As an openly gay man with mental disorders, Joey Solomon’s work hones in on the psychology of self through portraits of his immediate family as well as a high emphasis of self-portraiture. 

Solomon pulls much of his documenting and image making perspective from personal entanglements in recurring themes of mental and physical illnesses based on the artist’s hospitalizations. His images continue to document motifs surrounding illness, gayness, ghostly emptiness and the erosion of our Earth. If nothing else, Solomon’s work serves to affirm a learning process of our tender and dysfunctional species.

Riley Goodman inquires folklore, American history, and humankind's relationship with the environments they inhabit in an effort to understand what endures, and how this endurance exists in relation to his own presence in the canon. By building narratives that create an ever-occurring amalgamation of time, Goodman encourages the viewer to question the tenants of authenticity, leaving 'historical truth' in an undisclosed middle ground. Goodman is a 2018 BFA graduate of VCUarts and his work has appeared in Time, Vice, and Oxford American, among other outlets. 

2021 marks my seventh year in Richmond, Virginia- four spent in undergrad at VCUarts, and now three as an emerging artist. I never imagined the impact that coming of age in this city would afford me. Richmond, a city alive in its own history, became a shelter to learn as I endured the universally difficult journey of leaving home for the first time, and growing up from 18 to 25. To live in Richmond is to be among both those around and those who came before us. Glints of afternoon sunlight creating movie-like sets, jazz music radiating from an indiscernible car, initials carved into your basement door- everything brushes the threshold of reality and fiction, past and present. It is the almost indescribable everyday magic of Richmond that has allowed me to become the photographer and person I am today. To Cultivate A Magnolia, an ongoing series, examines the folklore and history of Richmond and greater Virginia, queer identity, and the moments of reflection that come as we age. The award of this fellowship will assist in my continuation of this project, along with financing the cost of production for forthcoming exhibition and publishing opportunities of the work.

Ross Gerhold is a photographer and cinematographer based in Richmond, Virginia. His work approaches aspects of loneliness and failed society, generally within architecture, from an almost paranoid distance. Using a mix of contemporary street and documentary style, he aims to show the beauty that can lie within such societal decay.

The title of the piece, Industry, derives from the official state slogan of Utah. This motto, along with symbols of honeybees and beehives, are ubiquitous throughout the state and were adopted in homage to the work ethic and religious beliefs of the area’s early pioneers. In 2021, these ideas are seemingly affirmed by Utah’s highest-in-the-nation rankings in terms of economic strength and population growth. However, it plummets to 43rd in air and water quality, and 46th in pollution. Operating as a contemporary memento mori, this image petitions viewers to consider bounty and loss as both direct and indirect results of industry, and the potential social and environmental impacts of our industrial ambition.

Bridget Conn is a photographic artist who explores the potential of photography as a chemical and physical medium through the creation of chemigrams. Dealing with themes of mark-making, written language, and the challenges of communication, Conn investigates the boundaries of the medium through prints, wall installations, and sculptural works. She received her BFA (2000) from Tulane University and MFA (2003) from the University of Georgia. She currently resides in Savannah, Georgia, USA. 

Conn’s solo exhibitions include the Kimball Art Center in Park City, UT, the William King Museum in Abingdon, VA, the Art Museum of the University of Memphis, the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art in Augusta, GA, and the Art Institute of Atlanta for Atlanta Celebrates Photography. Group shows include Gallery 1/1 in Seattle, the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, CO, the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA, Candela Books + Gallery in Richmond, VA, and Sparks Gallery for the Medium Festival of Photography in San Diego. Internationally she has shown in the Chiang Mai Photography Festival in Thailand, as well as venues in Italy, Hungary and South Korea. Her work has been featured in Lenscratch, The Hand Magazine, Exposure Magazine, Aeonian Magazine, and Focal Plane Journal.