Z wystawy „CrossWorlds”


„CrossWorlds” – Diana Pankova and Jeff McConnell

Mińsk – Minsk, New Jersey

Białoruś – Belarus, USA



Diana Pankova and Jeff McConnell began their collaboration in 2019, after meeting at an exhibition in Heidelberg and deciding to take their interest in long-exposure photography in a new direction.
Diana is from Minsk, in Belarus, and there studied music and philosophy before discovering photography, and gravitating quickly toward simple cameras and analog methods. She has exhibited and given workshops on pinhole photography widely.
Jeff lives in New Jersey, USA, and found alternative photography when there was no camera of a kind to make the pictures he imagined. He graduated from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia in 2000, has been exploring photography without lenses ever since, and has also shown work and given workshops in numerous countries.


Jeff McConnell & Diana Pankovas


CrossWorlds is a series of solargraphs, long-exposure pinhole photographs that record the passage of the sun. It’s a unique corner of photographic practice, relying on weather and atmosphere, that is difficult to predict. ?rossWorlds are double exposures from different places across the world, where the artists found themselves. The project was born from both Diana’s and Jeff’s love of chasing the sun’s magic, and their curiosity in exploring other dimensions of dialogue. Both artists engage the perception of time and our relation to the surrounding world in their work, so this correspondence of observation and perception extends the practice of both, and builds into something new. Sending exposed photo papers across an ocean, or physically carrying them across borders, the artists share, cross, merge their native time-spaces into hybrid realities.
CrossWorlds images are an exploration of how the multidimensionality of reality can be captured by the simplest technology. The pattern the sun makes across the sky is both a physical reflection and a symbolic depiction of the passage of time. Combined with the landscape, half-abstracted by long exposure, the trails represent a measure of reality collected in one image, still, but internally moving. In placing a solar camera for exposure, an artist captures not only a piece of the reality of a place, but also collects some of his/her lifetime, accumulated in a visible two-dimensional format.
Transporting these papers physically across borders and time zones, to gather drops of personal lifetimes in chemical emulsion, results in images that show realities merging at their crossroads – containing recognizable contours of both colliding worlds, but with blurred transitions, and new forms grown through that process of collision.
CrossWorlds is a dialogue between realities, reflecting on our entanglement with time, space, chance, natural forces, and each other.

www.instagram.com/solar_crossworlds