Simmer
Fall 2022
The artists, writers, and photographers in ‘Simmer’ depart on their
own adventures, unleashing the tense quietude that rings through
the issue. In their many moments of pause, the artists register a sense of opposition, abjection, underscoring a deviation from
comforts. Whereas some of the imagemakers place an emphasis on
the process of their images to assert the absence of stasis of the
moment, others lean towards the abstraction in a glean towards
marking their subjects and spaces surreal. The artificiality of their
image thus turns us to the developing technologies of imagemaking
that are rapidly advancing how and why we photograph. As
artificial intelligence is contested and questioned within art spaces,
the artists within Simmer remind us to question how and why do we
value an image? In their strained comportments, their figures and
subjects serve to visualize the lingering emptiness, anger, and grief
that remains prescient on the minds of our contributors in 2022.
The poems that accompany the works in Simmer, speak to the
restlessness while gleaning into the inabilities of reaching reso-
lution within these moments of distress–urging a collective turn
inward. In simmer-ing with these images we ask that you lean into
the otherworldly constructions of these scenes as they may offer
sites to process the pressures of late-stage capitalism and all of its
painful offerings.
– Katie Noble and Carlos Ocando
Front Cover: Tielin Ding @mr.somesomething
Back Cover: Jarod Polakoff @jarodpolakoff
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