Bronx-born photographer Allen Palmer focuses on kitschy and archetypal American scenes in a way that invites viewers to ponder the image’s darker underbelly. Frequently depicting empty rooms, deserted streets and inanimate objects, the saturated and unnatural colors of his Giclée prints give these moments of Americana a deeply unsettling light. By honing in on the most incongruous object in the field, or shooting a familiar subject out of focus, Palmer leaves the viewer to investigate what might have been an unremarkable scene more attentively.

His photographs become investigations into the human unconscious, as it is stirred and suggested in his images. By revealing the uncanny objects and scenes that we routinely pass over and through, Palmer – a practicing psychoanalyst after all – confronts viewers with the unsettling elements of their everyday that otherwise go unnoticed (or unacknowledged). Palmer’s skill, as opposed to many surrealists whose art has a similar goal, is to reveal this social unconscious in a playful rather than jarring way. Allen Palmer’s works have been exhibited in the US. He currently lives and works in Newton, Massachusetts.

With their powerfully evocative images, Beth Parin's photographs immerse the viewer into a realm of enigmatic tableaus that straddle the line between the fantastical and the eerily familiar. Tapping into subconscious anxieties and fantasies, Beth offers archetypal scenarios about home, childhood, gender and sexual issues and isolation. Incorporating a collage technique into her work, she pieces together incongruent images to create a mood of fragmentation, as well as the suggestion of disparate stories colliding and conjoining to generate unique narratives.

Nature is a major presence in Beth's photos, and she often juxtaposes indoor domestic scenes with untamed nature as a background. But this is nature perceived from an ironic distance, a presence which her subjects are oblivious to or cut off from. The individuals in her photographs are searching hungrily for meaning and appear unaccustomed to the landscapes in which she's placed them. The startling subject matter of her photographs, coupled with the provocative issues that her work addresses, make Beth Parin's photography a unique source of enduring, cutting-edge art.

The photography of Yasmin Shirali speaks eloquently without the need for lips. Gothic, deep delights, Yasmin works show her unafraid to dabble in the dark, yet always look toward the light. Themes of broken communication, life, death, the finding of the self, and the depths of the emotional being feature heavily in slickly composed images that provoke the viewer to thoughts that challenge the easy status quo, and the fog of everyday living. Her images arise from the passion of her self taught youth, but there is no roughness in her works to belie her years. Her use of various photo manipulation techniques adds surreal depths that further draw the viewer in.

Once viewed, her images remain emblazoned in the mind. Such is the power of her works, not only do they entertain, but they cause the viewer to muse upon the subject, to feel the emotion of the image. Even subjects without faces cry to the depths of your soul.