Intentions Still Artifact is a correspondence through poetry between Katherine LaPlant and Gina Abelkop. During a six month period the authors sent poems back and forth through mail and email, exploring themes of loss, memory, and home. Having met only once prior to the start of the book, the poems also served to create an intimate friendship. Phrases, words, and ideas transformed from one poem to the next as the authors responded to each other’s plaintive, broken narratives; personal histories became intertwined as complex stories built upon and then broke off from each other, sometimes meeting again several poems later or disintegrating all together. The book is a testament to a particular time in each woman’s life; an examination of gender and identity that usually takes place alone becomes a shared archeology.

Watching You, Watching Us
Alexis Dei Santi and Carrie Gabella’s Watching You, Watching Us, a collaborative book of photographs, explores the complexities of femininity and female experience through the lenses of their respective cameras. The images come to us from California, Ohio, and Ecuador; the artists sent photographs back and forth through email, responding not only to the ideas captured in the landscapes but also to each other’s bodies, presented in their stylistically different but thematically connected self-portraits. Neither artist knew each other before the project; in this way the book serves not only as an artistic endeavor but also as a testament to the creation of a relationship between two women.

Alexis Dei Santi’s photographs explore the performative aspects of femininity-- the glamour and artificial trappings of what has been deemed female. Shot in San Diego, her photos dissect and contrast the domestic with the vintage sensibility of dress-up and the performance of gender and identity, transforming synthetic representations of femininity into warm, compassionate images. Carrie Gabella’s work, shot in Ecuador and Ohio, strips down the body to the most intimate, sincere moments, traversing the language of what remains beneath the surface of our most guarded moments. Both women seek to complicate and contribute to the lexicon of female identity and relationships through their stunning, intimate photographs.