BmoreArt

Photographers Jonna McKone and Elena Volkova explore the intersections of time, memory, and history through distinct but resonant photographic practices. Both artists turn to slow, meticulous processes to interrogate how place and identity are inscribed and reinterpreted through personal and collective experience. 

In Silver and Earth reflects the materials central to their practices. Silver, the foundation of traditional photographic processes, and earth, a marker of place and history, serve as essential elements in crafting their imagery. These materials ground their work in both the tangible and symbolic, highlighting delicate landscapes and portraits. 

Together, McKone and Volkova reframe traditional modes of seeing, offering 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.

Read the full interview with the artists here.

Jonna McKone is an artist and filmmaker whose work combines documentary, narrative, archives, and materials-based photography processes to explore the fragility of truth and the land and body as vessels of memory. Her work has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, a Rubys Artist Grant, the Puffin Foundation, the Maryland State Arts Council as well as a Center for Documentary Studies’ Fellowship. She has been an artist-in-residence at Monson Art’s Abbott Watts Photography Residency, Platteforum, Skidmore’s Storyteller’s Institute and Full Circle in Baltimore, MD. Her work has shown at Candela Gallery (Richmond, MD), Hamiltonian Gallery (Washington, DC), Resort (Baltimore, MD), Power Plant Gallery (Durham, NC), The Walters Museum (Baltimore, MD), Interloc Projects (Thomaston, ME), VisArts (Rockville, MD), Zo Gallery (Baltimore, MD) and the Midwest Center for Photography (Wichita, KS).  

Alongside her studio practice she is an independent film producer whose work includes Theo Anthony’s All Light Everywhere (Sundance Special Jury Award, 2021), Julie Wyman’s The Tallest Dwarf (SXSW, 2025), Meredith Moore’s Margie Soudek’s Salt and Pepper Shakers (Sundance, 2023) and Corey Hughes’ Your Final Meditation (Rockaway, 2024). Her work as a filmmaker has been supported by Ford Foundation | Just Films, Sandbox Films, Sundance Institute, Points North Institute, SFFILM, Kenneth/Rainin Foundation, California Humanities, Cinereach, IDA and ITVS. Jonna is a graduate of Bowdoin College and Duke’s MFA in Experimental & Documentary Arts.

Elena Volkova is a Ukrainian-born artist and educator whose creative work explores themes of liminality, subjectivity, and domesticity. She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally and has received numerous awards, including the Rubys Grant, the Baltimore Municipal Art Society Travel Prize, and a fellowship at Hamiltonian Artists. Volkova has also been a social practice resident at the Maryland Center for History and Culture and the Anacostia Arts Center, among other institutions. Her work is included in private and public collections, such as those of Johns Hopkins University, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Maryland Center for History and Culture. Volkova resides in Baltimore, MD, and teaches photography at Stevenson University.