A reference to a past series titled Trash (2019) which reflects on how forgotten waste fuses with the environment, Present (2021) is a series that consists of six diptychs, all digital scans of film photographs. Abby explores the mundane in the present age of modernity and the spaces that seem trapped in a moment or in an era. It begs the question: How do you identify when an image was created? How does that affect our collective memory? It is up to the viewer to determine the answer.

Abby Alishio is an artist and filmmaker born and raised in Seattle. She attends the University of Washington, where she is double majoring in Photo/Media and Cinema and Media Studies, with a minor in Art History. Abby’s work explores issues of both local and global interest, including but not limited to mental health and representation, usually through the mediums of video and photography. Using visual techniques inspired by cinematic styles, along with the ambiguity of a location or subject, she creates a quietness in her imagery to allow moments of reflection.

She is currently in pre-production for a film called HAPA which deals with the Asian-American experience, a script she wrote and is going to direct. During her time at the UW, she has used her knowledge from film to inspire her work in Photo/Media and vice versa. As she spends more time in filmmaking, she continues to learn of the inequalities within this industry beyond representation on the screen itself. The lack of representation within stories and characters is widely discussed and is subsequently shifting, but the lack of diversity continues into the crew–the cinematographers, composers, directors and beyond. This disparity has sparked her to create work that represents this inequality and also to ensure that the crew on her short film consists almost entirely of women and people of color.