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Work Samples

Slow Drift #1

Chemi-lumen from Slow Drift work in progress

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About Jonna

Baltimore City

Jonna McKone is an artist, filmmaker, and freelance producer, editor and director.  Her work spans video and film, documentary, archives, abstraction and long-term collaborations to explore personal and collective histories, land and personal stories.   She recently was a fellow at the Center for Documentary Studies where she developed a collaborative photography project which will be published as a photobook. Her work has shown at film festivals, galleries and museums around the US and... more

Slow Drift

Slow Drift is a photography, installation and research project exploring landscapes connected to legacies of plantations in Maryland.  The work records soundscapes, people, landscapes, suburban and rural spaces and objects. Each image traverses history through large format photographs, non-lens processes, medium format photography, and archives.

first last light

These images include works I have made over the last two years: on the road living out west, photographing at a field research station in the Bay of Fundy, teaching in Western North Carolina and making images of my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland. This project explores how the earth holds its own sense of time and keeps a record of history through fossils, waterways, soil, and the atmospheric qualities of a place. I began photographing this series during the quietness of the pandemic, thinking about how fragile and porous our bodies are with the environment and built places. This work is inspired by myths, the daily dramas of living, the unpredictability of the weather, and how people structure their spaces and relationship to the living world

Ruins, I

This installation was performed with members of Raw Silk. Made from a 100-foot roll of 16mm film shot in the Walters Art museum, the objects seen in the film were illuminated with conservation-appropriate lighting. The footage maps archaeological eras through chronological and proportional 16mm footage -- each frame of the film represents approximately 1.6 years. The emulsion was then subjected to processes like bleaching, burying, soaking and scratching inspired by technological, geographic or geological events associated with archaeological periods and eras dating back to 4500 BCE (the age of the oldest object documented in the film.) (Camera/Editor/Director)

A Year In Voicemails

A short documentary about places and traces -- abstracted phone booths become increasingly legible as the catalog of information about a father and son grows. This piece asks us to consider the nature of the artifacts we leave behind, particularly audio voicemails, a digital artifact, recorded and performed, with expectation of being quickly deleted.  (Camera/Editor/Director)

Yields

An experimental documentary film, non-narrated and observational, that looks at the historic and economic vestiges embedded in gesture and landscape in a rural region of North Carolina. Yields meditates on the failure of industrial promise through a series of short vignettes that aggregate to express how absurdly intertwined a place can become with what it produces. The film is a meditation on sound, landscape, and labor in a rural economy abruptly severed from its historical connection to the production and processing of poultry. (Camera/Editor/Director)

An Incomplete History

This installation used text, notes from my father's archive that I installed walls around the room and projections and TVs as mediums to come to terms with my father's untimely death.

A Note From Home

A Note From Home is a long-term, participatory project and forthcoming photo book using photography, portraiture, oral history, writing and archives to explore the complexity of family and personal narratives in collaboration with young people who have experience in the foster care system or with homelessness. The images above consist of portraits I shot, collaborative images and images from family archives. Initially funded by the Center for Documentary Studies' Lewis Hine Fellowship, each young person involved in the project produced their own body of work, exploring an aspect of their personal narrative in search of new meanings of home and family. The work explores rites of passage, the strength required to constantly rebuild home, landscape as a form of protection, imagined childhood maps, and the everyday things people carry with them.  

  • Anita

    2019, medium format film, archival pigment print
  • Stephanie

    Stephanie, archival pigment print from medium format film
  • Stephanie M

    Stephanie M, archival pigment print from medium format film
  • K'la

    K'la archival pigment print from medium format film
  • Mariah

    2019, archival pigment print from medium format negative
  • Anthony

    2019, archival pigment print from medium format negative
  • Dios

    2018, archival pigment print from medium format film
  • Alberto

    2018, archival pigment print from medium format film
  • Black Rock Group Show

    An installation of five images part of a juried show at the Black Rock Center for the Arts (2019). These images won first place in the show.

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Jonna 's Curated Collection

View Jonna 's favorite works from other Baker Artists