Artist: Omari Simmons
Photographer: MCP Photo | McKenna C Poe
Makeup: Adrienne Gagnier
Models: Omari Simmons and Ian Dominguez Ball
BTS Photography & Assistant: Perla Martinez
Location: Between Space Studio
NITROGEN: a colorless, odorless gas making up 78% of Earth's atmosphere, essential for life as a component of amino acids, proteins, and DNA.
Artist’s Statement: Liquid nitrogen becomes the weather of this world: cold, blinding, and persistent, obscuring what is closest and most desired. The landscape is emotional as much as physical, shaped by tension, rawness and love forced to exist in half-light. The fog represents the forces that have consumed all forms of intimacy. Yet authenticity persists. Breath cuts through the mist. Touch creates warmth where none should exist. This work honors queer devotion as wild, aching, and unsanctioned; a love, bond and openness that does not need clarity to be real, diverse and the only courage to keep pushing through the fog.
Proceeds of the prints from this collection are split equally between the photographer, the leading artist, and the organization or crowd-funding effort of that artist’s choice. Omari has selected The National Black Transgender Advocacy Coalition, the only social justice organization led by black trans people to collectively address the inequities faced in the black transgender human experience by overcoming violence and injustice in the world through the power, value and love of all people. Find out more at blacktrans.org
audio recommendation: “Hammer” By Lorde
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Photographer: MCP Photo
Model: McKenna C Poe
Location: Between Space Studio
CAESIUM - a soft, silvery-golden alkali metal and one of only five elemental metals that are liquid at room temperature. The International System of Units uses a specific hyperfine neutral caesium to define the basic unit of time, the second.
Artist’s Statement: What defines a second? How much can happen within one? If we’re lucky, we get to experience so many in our lifetimes, and with the pace of our current world, it can be hard to appreciate and savor the little moments, the seconds of time, that we get to experience. In my artistic lifetime, I’ve defined myself as so many things: a ballerina, an actor, a student, a business owner, a photographer, a designer - the list goes on. We seek to define our personhood and our seconds in order to validate progress in our society that doesn’t reward rest. Through this project, I wanted to visualise a second of unrest, a second of joy, a second of just being. By opening the camera shutter for exactly a second, measured by the combustion rate of Caesium, I aim to capture just that: being.
Proceeds of the prints from this collection are split equally between the photographer and the organization or crowd-funding effort of the photographer’s choice. McKenna has selected Bushwick Ayuda Mutua, a network of neighbors supporting neighbors in Bushwick. Find out more at BushwickAyudaMutua.com
See more @mcpphoto.png on Instagram or at MCPPHOTO.com
Audio Recommendation: “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)” covered by Sammy Rae and The Friends
