Jill Frank

Jill Frank is an Atlanta-based artist and educator. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography at Georgia State University. Reviews of her work have appeared in Art Forum, Art in America and The Paris Review. She has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia. She studied art and photography at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Bard College.

Jill works primarily in photography and video to explore the struggle to present one’s identity within unstable environmental, political and social contexts. Diverging from traditional documentary forms, Jill uses sound, scale, repetition and staging to record conquests and games, where representation plays a decisive and transformative role.

‘Homecoming Dance', 2021, Atlanta’. All portraits were taken of students as they entered a school dance during the end of pandemic. Students are standing alone rather than in pairs, in the waiting area near lockers, in line for the official photo booth. All photographed from an awkward side angle.

The overall project includes subjects at the beginning, middle, and end of adolescence, all the way to the cusp of adulthood. Maturing from childhood into adulthood inevitably carries the complex and nuanced themes of current cultural and political issues. Inevitably, elements of the American South’s varied cultural identities are revealed through these characters who are in the process of discovering their own emotional and physical presence.

Website: jillfrank.net
Instagram: @jjjjilllllll

Courtney Griffith

Courtney Griffith is an artist and educator based in Oakland, CA.

Born in San Diego, she moved to the Bay Area to study art at Santa Clara University. She began her teaching and studio practice at Root Division, a visual art non-profit in San Francisco. She recently completed an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Mills College, where she had the opportunity to work as a teaching assistant, shop assistant, and a preparator in the Mills College Art Museum.

Griffith’s artwork has been displayed in museums and galleries including the Palo Alto Art Center, San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, and Florina Museum of Contemporary Art. She has performed her work, The Weight of Absence, at Root Division and at the Mills College Art Museum.

Unable to biodegrade, synthetic trash and industrial fishing waste float through the sea like ghosts trapped between realms. I collect and photograph them, challenging the finality of trash and its categorization as separate from nature/civilization.

Website: courtgriff.com
Instagram: @courtgriffith