ECO ECHO:  The Persistence of Conscience

Hothouse is part of an ongoing body of work entitled pelt. These pieces are collages in two senses — digital collage prints form a base with faux fur interrupting the picture plane. Each image has a curated set of flora, contributing to a long lineage of human systems of taxonomy trying to make a linear grid out of an inherent sprawl. Our ecosystems are all in flux and tumult. Amidst the grief, I am genuinely moved by studying the origins of individual plants, a way of taking in a fallen landscape piece by piece.

The themes of proliferation and adaptation are of added interest to me as the parent of a young child. My son has several “touch and feel” books, with textured elements meant to add tactility to simple stories of animals, people, and plants. Faux fur, suggesting a plastic mammalian presence, is embedded into these scenes, hinting at breaks in the structure, novel growth yet unheard of, a future that can’t be predicted or written. 

Queen Anne’s Lace is an anthotype created by using a beetroot solution. Anthotyping is a sustainable, impermanent process, and the results are somewhat unpredictable. In this piece I was surprised when the Queen Anne’s lace, a plant I thought I knew well, had dyeing properties of its own that interacted with the beetroot, causing a yellow glow around the plant. This feels emblematic of collaborations with the natural world, which for me often yield interesting and unpredictable results.

-Morgan Barrie

Morgan Barrie is an artist and photographer based in the Midwest. She studied at Columbia College Chicago, where she received her bachelor’s degree, and Eastern Michigan University, where she received an MFA in photography in April 2013. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She currently maintains a studio in Menomonie, Wisconsin, and is an assistant professor in the School of Art & Design at the University of Wisconsin-Stout.

Ecologists use the phrase “shifting baseline syndrome” to refer to the gradual change in accepted norms as it relates to the natural environment. Predicated on a lack of direct experience with our natural world, the slow but certain acceptance of greater and greater levels of environmental damage effectively instills paralysis when it comes to confronting environmental damage around us. The shifting baseline, the forgetting of what has been lost as it is lost, is described as the single greatest hurdle to collective efforts aimed at preventing, minimizing, or delaying worst possible outcomes. 

With storm events getting stronger, temperatures getting warmer, sea levels rising, and algal blooms increasing in duration and frequency (affecting salt and freshwater systems alike), Florida is absolutely a frontline to the crisis of a warming planet. Still, for anyone to see hurricanes and other climate tragedies as anything less than matched violence is, at this point, disingenuous. We coevolved with the life on our planet, yet instead of aligning our efforts with our host, under the weight of persistent assaults, countless ecosystems are degrading and species are disappearing, including, perhaps, eventually our own. Even the knowledge that our planet has weathered cataclysmic events in its past, events that have rendered all complex life on the planet to ash and mineral, has not checked our destructive behaviors. 

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I have little hope for us, but I have absolute faith in our planet’s capacity for renewal. This work has become a way to keep an open heart amid escalating environmental breakdown. I retain authentic love for this place and for the living world. Through this work, I have begun to find comfort in watching this natural world, in all its sensuous beauty, repossess our land, pull down our walls, and reclaim all that we’ve proven to be insufficient stewards of.

-Jeff Beekman

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The damming of rivers has historically created inexpensive energy. This low-cost energy has fueled a diversity of industries, ranging from Hanford’s now decommissioned nuclear production complex in Washington State’s channeled scablands, to several of Google’s data centers, located in the Dalles, Oregon. The energy produced by dams was once considered a form of green energy. Over time, the long-term environmental effects of damming have significantly challenged this green energy narrative and require a re-evaluation of how dams contribute to climate change.

These images are part of several interconnected projects which focus on the bioregion of the Pacific Northwest known as the Columbia River drainage basin. Within this bioregion, many microregions exist, functioning independently, while connected to the broader region. The included works focus specifically on the Channeled Scablands, in eastern Washington State. The works include a sustained focus on the area, with emphasis on four controversial federal Snake River dams, which impose a significant impact on the ecology of the region, exemplified by the decimated keystone species, salmon.

-Dennis DeHart.

DeHart received his MFA in photography from the University of New Mexico in 2002. He previously served as an assistant professor of photography with the State University of New York College at Buffalo and is currently an associate professor of art with Washington State University in Pullman, Washington.

Carbon, Element explores the link between human-caused global warming and increasing wildfire intensity. Over the past two decades, three-quarters of New Mexico counties have experienced moderate to exceptional drought — a key indicator of a warming planet — culminating in a devastating 2022 wildfire season that burned nearly 860,000 acres. By using carbon as an element of continuity between the fires, the photographs, and our warming climate, these site-specific charcoal pigment prints form a physical connection between the photographs and the subject, accentuating the relationship between our collective actions and the well-being of our environment.

-Tyer W. Green

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Wildfires are raging across the western United States, burning up increasingly large swaths of land every year. While fire is a natural part of many ecosystems, the increasing presence of larger, faster, and hotter fires is a reminder of the rapidly changing environment. Begun after experiencing the devastation of a wildfire in my hometown, this work explores solastalgia, which describes emotional and existential distress caused by negative environmental change.

Lands integral to our identity, our livelihoods, and our wellbeing are shifting and changing without advance notice or means of control. The experience of a wildfire is all-consuming. It crowds out one’s vision. The pillar of smoke is unmistakable. Our communities face collective traumas as we constantly refresh web pages and databases, waiting for news of the fire’s spread and possible containment. Although these are localized examples of wildland fire and the trauma that follows, collectively the scale of these events is unfathomable. The day-to-day struggles of normal life continue as fires rage outside our windows, setting our lives in a scene of gray oppression. Cycling endlessly from active fires to their aftermath, the images reference the ever-worsening pattern of climate-driven fires.

Integrating photographs, moving images, and textual works, The Sun Sets Midafternoon examines the immediate aftermath of megafires on surrounding communities, interweaving narratives of ecological devastation, collective trauma, and climate grief.

-Jessica Hays

My studio practice and research investigate the intricate relationship between humanity and the natural world, focusing on environmental transformation, resource extraction, and photography’s role in shaping perceptions of landscape. The works in this exhibition come from two distinct but interconnected projects: Sunstroke and Waveforms.

Sunstroke emerges as an expression of climate angst and anxiety. Its colors and textures produce sublime, abstracted landscapes that are at once alluring and alarming, and through scale and thoughtful installation I aim to produce an affective reaction in the viewer. The works are process-oriented and heavily layered, created through a combination of contact-printed transparencies, physical objects, time, luck, and what I can only describe as chemical magic. The images begin as lumen prints, an alternative process in which gelatin silver paper is exposed to UV light outside the controlled environment of the darkroom, a deliberate misuse of the material that results in unpredictable chemical reactions and dramatic color shifts. The transparencies are appropriated aerial images of uncontained forest fires sourced from NASA and USGS databases, lending an atmospheric quality in which what appear to be clouds are in fact billowing towers of smoke.

In contrast, Waveforms operates as a more precise and cerebral counterpart. In this series, I juxtapose Augmented Landscapes,physically altered photo assemblages, with Performed Landscapes, where manipulated prints are re-photographed in the studio. These strategies emphasize the tension between human intervention and the inherent limits of the natural world. Together, Sunstroke and Waveforms underscore the fragile balance between human ambition and environmental resilience, using photographic processes to question how landscapes are constructed, mediated, and ultimately understood.

-Josh Hobson

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Shared Breath: Motherhood in the Time of Climate Crisis explores environmental grief by investigating the interconnection of motherhood and the climate crisis. The work is intersectional and interdisciplinary by nature, aiming to collapse boundaries between personal and public spheres. The work queries: 1) How should we acknowledge environmental grief and our uncertain future? 2) What does it mean to parent in the time of climate crisis?

Our collective loss of thinking of the Earth as a “mother” — who both provides for humans and should be cared for — has had devastating effects on the planet. When we look at pre-industrial perspectives of Earth, we see humans revering the Earth as a kind of mother. Yet our post-industrial framework does not recognize the limitations of a finite planet. The strain on mothers is paralleled in the plight of our Mother Earth who is being pushed beyond capacity due to anthropogenetic climate change.

After the largest fire in New Mexico’s history burned two years ago just a short drive from my home, I began to see the climate emergency and my kids’ adolescence as tethered — as a story arc within their lives. To begin to heal the Earth we must acknowledge what’s at stake and break down our “illusions of separateness” as scholar Naomi Klein states. With this aim, I create images that collapse the ongoing climate crisis into my children’s lineage and impending adulthood, to recognize that the two are connected. I combine images of pyrocumulonimbus clouds, created by the heat of wildfires, with the outlines of my children’s bodies, to tether the boundaries of a damaged environment with those of the human form. In other images, NASA satellite imagery of New Mexico forest fires is paired with images of my daughter’s breath, illustrating a “shared breath.” There are many health risks from the particulates in the air from forest fires and we are fundamentally connected to our environment physiologically and psychologically. 

As marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson states, “We need to have a whole cultural shift, where it becomes our culture to take care of the Earth, and in order to make this shift, we need storytelling about how the Earth takes care of us and how we can take care of her.” My work aims to weave personal and public dialogues that illustrate this interconnection.

-Megan Jacobs

I am interested in experimenting with early analog photographic processes and while incorporating digital processes. I have been working with lumen prints, a camera-less process that uses only sunlight and darkroom photographic paper. It is wonderfully slow and allows for numerous possibilities of experimentation while the paper is exposed to the sun.

The theme of nature has become very important in my artistic production. On one hand, global warming threatens the existence and survival of the planet; on the other hand, I have entered into a dialogue with the theoretical frameworks of posthumanism, not because I believe that the end of humanism has arrived, but because I consider that there are non-human forms of expression that we must learn to consider.

This work is an invitation to reflect on the beauty we find in all aspects of life, and at the same time on the fragility of life itself in an era where the unbridled advance of capitalism and its unregulated development tramples on all aspects of life, whether human or non-human.

-Leonor Jurado

Leonor Jurado is a visual artist and educator. Her work explores the photographic object using alternative materials and processes, focusing on themes of precariousness and vulnerability in relation to the body and nature. Leonor has exhibited both individually and collectively in the United States and Ecuador.

The project Synthetic Nature explores the intersection of the natural and artificial worlds, specifically through the lens of everyday consumption and waste. Since 2020, I have been dedicated to examining plastic packaging waste, focusing on the leftover materials that resemble perishable and everyday consumer goods. I question these forms’ symbolic significance and enduring existence beyond their utilitarian function.

During this exploration, I’ve found inherent beauty in these plastic materials once their protective purpose is fulfilled. I experiment with placing these objects in dynamic relationships with elements and mutable materials, examining how plastic has been integrated into nature. By reimagining plastic packaging and its relationship with nature, my work communicates a visual narrative that reflects a desire for optimism and, most important, caution.

I aim to develop a comprehensive analysis of these translucent materials to fully understand them and challenge my feelings of guilt about consumption and waste. My work with plastics has adapted and continues to evolve. It continues to deepen my, and hopefully others’, understanding of the interplay between humanity, consumption, and the environment.

Sarah Knobel

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Nowspace is a collection of live-streaming video collages containing footage from cameras pointed skyward around the world. The work depicts the world’s skies knitted together in a simultaneous moment, connecting local with global. In Four Corners, the locations of the streams focus on the cardinal directions — North, South, East, and West — from live-stream cameras located at the furthest points in these directions around the Earth. The interrelation of the geometric forms is based on the structure of an astrolabe, an early scientific instrument used for reckoning time, navigation, and astronomical observations.

Created out of climate anxiety and feelings of isolation during the pandemic, Nowspace searches for a way of feeling the expanse and totality of the Earth in a suspended state of time and place. Relieving the camera of its function as documentarian, it is rather used simply as an apparatus for looking, focusing within a single frame and crystalizing attention to the present. It is within this space that the weight of the moment presents itself, providing strange comfort in the way everything seems to slow under the watch of an unblinking eye.

Nowspace is an open window, a portal to everywhere at once. It encourages

repeated and prolonged observation while celebrating the vastness of the naturalworld and providing an opportunity to linger in each moment of now.

-Michelle Leftheris

Ryan Parker (b. 1989, Twentynine Palms, CA) is a lens-based artist and documentarian based in
Bozeman, MT. He was raised on military installations across the US and Japan until the age of 13. These
early years became integral to the subject matter within Parkers lens-based practice. His work is
concerned with the altered landscape, specifically the relationship between industrial standardization
and economic factors which lead to upheaval in small communities. His large format photographs
document the hinterland, the space subtly forgotten.
Parker has exhibited his photographs with the Holter Museum of Art (Helena), the Yellowstone Art
Museum (Billings), Usage Gallery (Brooklyn), Filter Photo (Chicago), Praxis Gallery (Minneapolis), The
Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins), Atlanta Photography Group (Atlanta), Blue Sky Gallery
(Portland), Subjectively Objective (Detroit), Ejecta Projects (Carlisle), and Orr Street Studios (Columbus).
In addition to exhibiting his work, it has been included in publications by Light Leaked, Subjectively
Objective, and Pine Island Press. In 2016 he received a Sidney E. Frank Foundation Fellowship, and in
2014 the Edwards Family Endowment for the Arts.

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“Love Canal; Evidence of Injury” examines the legacy of North America’s first Superfund site through the unsung history of women who organized for environmental justice in their neighborhoods. Nestled just outside of Niagara Falls this sleepy town in upstate NY became headline news when an entire working-class community was poisoned by leaking dioxin containers buried just beneath the asphalt. By the late 1970’s toxic sludge began creeping into people’s basements as the mothers of Love Canal reported alarming rates of birth defects, miscarriages, and childhood leukemia. 

Today, wildlife like mullein and milkweed thrive despite elevated toxicity levels that remain ever-present within the landscape. Driveways to nowhere, broken streetlights, and decommissioned fire hydrants mark the empty streets adjacent to a fenced off piece of land where the 99th Street School used to sit. Empty lots where houses once sat crumble as feral gardens of lupine and Queen Anne’s lace remediate the soil. But, in and around the containment zone, are the stories of mothers who fought for the right to a safe and healthy environment. The intersections of class, race, gender, and housing are inextricably linked to the struggle as well, though many of these stories were omitted from the mainstream narrative. Broader themes in the series explore adaptation, toxicity, reproduction, mutation, and survival – with a focus on the interconnectedness of our fragile ecosystem and the human body. 

-Shanna Merola

Reverse of a Ruin emerges from my wanderings through natural environments set against the backdrop of our modern world. Through digital deconstruction and recombination, I transform photographs into intricate collages that visualize the passage of time and the myriad moments shaping our experience of place. These compositions, built from hundreds of image fragments, shift between macro and micro views. From afar, they may appear as cohesive landscapes or abstract assemblages; up close, they reveal a tapestry of individual elements — fragments of nature, human artifacts, and the digital framework binding them together.

The collages juxtapose the fleeting with the enduring, interweaving elements of contemporary life with evolving natural forms. Pixels and hard edges emphasize the digital construction of these scenes, where disparate moments coexist in a complex interplay. This series serves as an intervention in photography and representation, merging diverse elements into new wholes that blur the lines between human presence and natural environments.

-Laura Plageman

Algae, marine seaweed, one of the most ancient organisms, ancestors of modern plants, are the basis of almost all marine food chains. They are at the same time bioindicators of ocean health and one of the most promising sources of renewable energy.

The series MARINE SKINS, captured on the south coast of Norway, is a homage to these incredible organisms that arrive steadily with each high tide, forming multicoloured tapestries dotted with shells and stranded jellyfish on the beach. 

Walking along the shore, I inspect what the sea has left on its most recent visit, aware that in just over twelve hours a different carpet will adorn the sand. I take my harvest of the day and dry it in the sea breeze. The seaweed turns into translucent parchments. Taking advantage of the soft northern sunlight, I turn the seaweed gifted by the northern sea into my MARINE SKINS.

-Birte Pedersen

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My art practice engages our complex relationship with the natural world — we need it, we revere it, we protect it; and yet we also destroy it. I explore the ways that the natural world and human-made world intersect, exploring our relationships with the landscape, with plants and animals, and with climate change.

In Spectral, the three-dimensional bedsheet ghosts are a playful exploration of a variety of dramatic landscapes and biomes. The sheets are patterned with nature-themed imagery, which interlaces with the landscape, hinting at the domestic and our relationships with nature. The ghostly figures might be ghosts of the biome itself, of plants and trees, or former inhabitants, either animal or human.

The fact that they are three-dimensional when viewed with anaglyph 3D glasses seems to assert that they are “real” and heightens the absurdity. The images are meant to stand alone as two-dimensional prints as well, confusing the eye with the red/cyan shift. The series also references spirit photography, which played an important role in the development of photography around the turn of the nineteenth century.

-Areca Roe

Areca Roe is an artist based in Minnesota. She uses photography as well as video, sculpture, and installations to explore the interface between the natural and human-made domains.

Roe is an associate professor of photography and video at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and a member of Rosalux Gallery in Minneapolis. She has received several grants and fellowships supporting her work, including the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant and the Art(ists) on the Verge Fellowship.

Her work has been featured on several websites, including Colossal, Fast Company Juxtapoz, National Geographic, Slate, and WIRED; and in print magazines Der Spiegel Wissen, Le Monde, and The New Territory. Her work recently was acquired by the Minnesota Museum of American Art and the Minnesota Historical Society.

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I am a wave

I am the ocean

I am the universe

My series OCEANIC FEELING  is my personal spiritual approach of being in the world, my way of connection and communion with the ground of being. A kind of unity and sync with the sacred flow, the elan vital. I am drawn with all my senses to the collective wonder of existence witnessing its unfolding into the appearances of “the 10.000 things“, marveling patterns of matter shifting constantly in a fluid cosmic dance of waves and particles. All is projected and reflected like in the jewels of Indra’s Net, entangled interconnectedness.

Most of my images are shot in Infrared in a spectrum (850 nm) that the human eye cannot detect but that a lot of more-than-human-beings are able to perceive. Wandering the shores of ignorance and expanding my horizon I like both the idea of exploring reality beyond the limits of human perception, kind of lifting the veils… And the curious and empathetic attempt to envision how more-than-human-beings might perceive reality.

As opposed to the dominant focus on transcendence in Western culture it is about essential pure immanence that surrounds us, an immediate physical and emotional experience that grounds us in the world.

In a broader context I am contemplating our cultural values and disbalances, our unconscious shadows and a desperately needed mindset shift.

Inspired by Rilke ( I live my life in widening circles ) I am circling around this series; and 
as all views are partial views, with each approach I am emphasizing different qualities, exploring and playing with perception and consciousness; details, structure, sculpting presence…


With the story of the blind monks exploring an elephant and the famous Zen Garden in Kyoto in mind I created fragments that invite a meditation on the nature of completeness, perspective, rhythm, change and the flow of life.

-Melanie Schoeniger

-Melanie Schoeniger

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When working in painting, photography, or video, depending on the project, I work non-representationally through abstraction at the intersection of intimate and shared experiences. The artistic process involves research, often historical, then responding materially — a practice that frees me to clarify information subjectively. I am tied to the subject even when linked to a broader context.

Sometimes, I recycle items like my grandmother’s wallpaper into the art. Imitating life, I make intentional and unplanned marks, such as pouring, brushing, removing, or blowing, manifesting what we do or do not control. Light, framing, and gestures recur throughout my work. I can be intentionally anachronistic by subsuming certain styles or techniques. I differentiate myself by illuminating my experiences. My body of work, subject, process, gesture, historical ruminations, and storytelling through abstraction drive narrative through metaphor. Paint and markings demonstrate the physicality of interpretation. The point of the abstraction is to avoid the didactic nature of narration through a re-imagination of experience.

Water 1 and 2 are part of a body of photographic work andare reduced to simple color field images which offer hardly any internal references. “Why does this photo exist?” or “What is it about?” or “Is it water?” The images are about several things, including the scale of water relative to the scale of a human, the feel and look of water, and the need for actual water, not a photo of water.

J. Wren Supak