Ilit Azoulay, "The Keys"

This Israeli artist creates elegiac photographic tableaux, made up a wide and somewhat random assortment of ordinary objects—small rocks, houseplants, articles of clothing, to name just a few—that Azoulay finds, collects and collates, much like the relics from an archaeological dig. She then scans each item, digitally stitching together the final result from hundreds of files. Likewise the background (usually a blank wall) is lit and shot in exactly the same way a hundred times over, before the individual images—joined now with the objects—are blended into a seamless whole. Azoulay composes these photos to suggest associations among the objects that may or may not exist.