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.

This work documents the Bahia Honda Overland Highway, a two-lane highway that once connected the Florida Keys and the mainland. Substantially damaged by successive hurricanes dating back to 1935, it was eventually replaced in the 1970s and now stands as a quiet testament to both the impermanence of our gestures and the natural world’s capacity for renewal.

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. 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 becoming stronger, temperatures getting warmer, sea levels rising, and algal blooms increasing in duration and frequency (affecting salt and freshwater systems alike), Florida is absolutely at the 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 co-evolved 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. 

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.

Ice investigates how the content we consume informs and alters our perceptions of self. Through this lens, I am currently exploring the psychological perspective of environmental anxiety and its influences on our decision-making processes. I question the mental justifications that some eco-conscious artists, including myself, undergo as they grapple with the ethical dilemmas and guilt surrounding their work and its contribution to environmental harm.
-Kes Efstathiou

Drought is a key indicator of climate change. As the planet warms, weather events become more extreme, precipitation patterns change, and climate zones shift. One of the most drought-stricken areas in the United States is the Four Corners region of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah. This area is characterized by diverse and striking geography, marked by high desert landscapes, plateaus, and mountainous terrain. It has a semi-arid to arid climate, making it susceptible to desertification —

where water scarcity is exacerbated by frequent and intense drought conditions, posing challenges for ecosystems and communities.

The vulnerability of this region and the growing impact of climate change led me to visualize aridification. By sifting dirt down to 100 microns, I created man-made dust. I then suspended this dust in the air within the natural landscape, releasing it into strong wind gusts of up to 40 mph. These artificial clouds of dust are uncanny, seemingly unnatural in a natural setting. They feel “off” and allude to an ecosystem in distress.

These photographs were taken on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico in early 2023.

-Tyler 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

These images come from a larger body of work titled Sunstroke. I see this series as an expression of climate angst and anxiety. The colors and textures produce a sublime, abstracted landscape at once alluring and alarming. Through scale and thoughtful installation, I aim to produce an affective reaction in the viewer.

The works in Sunstroke are digital enlargements of lumen prints. Lumen printing is an alternative process which exposes traditional gelatin silver paper to UV light outside of the controlled environment of the darkroom. This is essentially a misuse of the material and results in fascinating chemical reactions, often producing dramatic colors. The behavior of the paper during lumen printing is determined by many factors including age and paper manufacturer. The original images were made as either 8×10, 11×14 or 16×20 prints. Given the intended affective impact of the work, I opted to digitize and then enlarge the works to their current scale.

The works from Sunstroke are process oriented and heavily layered. They are

produced by a combination of contact printed transparencies, physical objects, time, luck and chemical magic. I call it magic because despite my education in the medium, the reason behind these effects still eludes me and feels marvelous. The transparencies are appropriated aerial images of uncontained forest fires. The images were sourced from databases managed by NASA and USGS. These photos give my images an atmospheric quality, although what appear to be clouds are billowing towers of smoke. Other elements of these works are created by physically laying objects (of various opacity) on top of the exposing paper. This technique is a form of contact printing and is related to the photogram. Like this technique developed in the early twentieth century, the images from Sunstroke are camera-less.

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

The Cracks in the Ice project was inspired by my fifteen-year-old son Björn. During one of our many daily chats, he asked about climate change and what the world would look like in the future. I realized I had only murky visions of that future myself and could not give him a clear answer. His precarious start in life and subsequent surgeries make him crave stability. As a father, I hated that I could not provide much clarity for Björn and knew I needed to explore this idea with a photography project. Cracks in the Ice was born.

As I look to the future, the world that my son will inherit, and the forest where I live that may soon be on fire, climate change and its immediate impact on the environment constantly weigh on my mind. I thought about how scientists often look to the past to predict our future and decided to do my own research into historical images of glaciers. I curated a series of magic lantern glass slides to examine and consider. Each slide revealed a vintage photograph of glaciers, now disappearing or already gone. I then shattered the glass negatives to call attention to this loss and fragility of our planet, but also to echo an experience with my newborn son’s first four-month stay in the neo-natal intensive care unit or his twenty surgeries and six years of 120-hour-per-week home nursing.

Cracks in the Ice is a metaphor for the precariousness and vulnerability of those I love. It is also a way to speak to the profound loss from global warming and a planet under siege.

-Jason Lindsey

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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

Laura Plageman creates complex photographic works that challenge traditional landscape representation. Using techniques like digital compositing, physical manipulation of printed photographs, and iterative rephotography, she explores themes of time, perspective, and environmental change. Her work reflects on human impact and our multifaceted relationship to the landscape. Plageman earned a BA from Wesleyan University and an MFA from California College of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Houston Center for Photography, and the Bolinas Museum. It has been featured in publications like Harper’s Magazine and WIRED, and is included in the permanent collection of LACMA. Plageman lives and works in Oakland, California.

The north is my north, destination of my dreams, magnet of my reveries.
My south is on the equator, midway between the two poles, my home base for more
than forty years.
The lose leaf artist´s book BLUE WHALE LOOKING FOR A NEW HOME (2024)
pretends to combine my two worlds. In its search for a new home, the whale passes
through strange places in the south and discovers an exciting and exuberant new
world.

-Birte Pedersen

Birte Pedersen is a Norwegian self taught photographer who has been living in
Ecuador/South America for more than four decades. Her main interest lies in
capturing abstract details in nature to make the beauty of the world visible to
everyone who cares to see and defend it.
In her book POLAR BLUES (2021) she documents the highly endangered Arctic and
Antarctic world and describes the impact caused by mankind in the span of one
century.
She is now working with cyanotype, creating new worlds with negatives and sunlight,
watching the ephemeral beauty after exposure and the final deep blue emerging
under the jet of water.

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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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My series Beyond the Edge of Darkness reimagines the feeling of awe I experience when diving. My images utilize surreal colors inspired by coral reefs and nudibranchs to highlight bioluminescence, and to envision how underwater species sense the world via ultraviolet and infrared sight.

My impressionistic approach to a widely unseen world contemplates the mysteries of existence and what it means to be alive. As our oceans are in a vulnerable state, I hope that my focus on beauty and wonder will spark reflection about humanity’s role in our interconnected ecosystems, resonating deeply with Rachel Carson’s statement that “Wonder and humility do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.”

Heartbroken by the devastating news of a new mass bleaching event, I turned my grief into agency and created Ghosts of Future Beings. I reflect on the fading white beauty of corals during their elegy towards death and dissolution, using non-toxic potassium ferricyanide — often used as a bleaching agent — to imprint and illustrate their bleaching. I meditate about future generations and their haunting look back on us, inspired by Joanna Macy’s work and her “council of all beings.” 

Setting aside all plastic, petroleum, or any other toxin in my completely vegan process, I created this coral-shaped collage using my vast archive of plant photos as symbols for the vibrancy of life and the interconnectedness of universal flow.

-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