but not always is a collaborative body of work that turns to humor as both refuge and reckoning. In an era thick with division, exhaustion, and unease, laughter becomes more than a distraction—it becomes a tool for survival, a way of tracing meaning through contradiction, and a reminder that fragility and resilience often arrive hand in hand.

Together we inhabit a shared voice, one that allows us to approach difficult questions indirectly, circling the unspeakable until it can be glimpsed. What happens when disappointment becomes predictable enough to be absurd? When tenderness feels inseparable from menace? When the everyday tips, almost imperceptibly, into the surreal? Humor lets us hold these contradictions without resolution, to find in their friction something generative rather than paralyzing.

The images—some found, some made—are bound by a restrained palette of reds, blues, and the starkness of black and white. They slip between registers of intimacy and estrangement, inviting viewers into a terrain where joy collapses into dread, and absurdity edges against despair. In this shifting landscape, humor is not a release but a tension, an insistence that the comic and the tragic are never far apart.

Collaboration is our method and our ethic. The work is the record of a conversation that sustains us: messy, vulnerable, and essential. To work together is to resist the solitude of burnout, to affirm community in the face of fracture, and to spark dialogue in places where silence too often settles.

but not always does not resolve, nor does it soothe. It insists on the edge where laughter curdles, where intimacy unsettles, where joy and dread press up against one another. What remains is not comfort, but the uneasy recognition that sometimes the joke is on us, and we are still compelled to keep playing along.