Second Nature / Envisioning Tomorrow / Artist Bios

JAMES CASEBERE (BORN IN LANSING, MICHIGAN, 1953) is established at the forefront of artists working with constructed photography. For the last forty years, Casebere has created increasingly complex models to photograph in his studio. Based on architectural, art historical, and cinematic sources, his table-sized constructions are made of simple materials like paper and wood, pared down to essential forms. Casebere creates photographic tableaux that inhabit a space between abstraction and image, painting and photography. His scenes act as an assertion of possibilities, fantasies, and the relationship between them. In his recent exhibition On the Water’s Edge, the artist explored climate change through architecture—offering a glimpse of possible human adaptations to the impending environmental disaster.

LAURA MCPHEE (BORN IN NEW YORK, NEW YORK, 1958) is noted for her large-scale photographs that juxtapose formally intricate images of the land against disconcerting clues to the reality of life in the twenty-first century. Her color photographs capture subtle histories, forgotten spaces, and landscapes altered by human technology. In her work, McPhee conveys a sense of particular experiences and the paradoxes and conundrums she sees within the frame. Her constantly evolving practice has grown to include portraits, landscapes, interiors, and the tensions that open up in each between the cultural and the natural—particularly Americans’ conflicting ideas about landscape, land use, and the ways in which we define and manage our relationship to the land. For example, her Guardians of Solitude series documents the aftermath of wildfire and the nascent regrowth—an increasingly frequent cycle that is necessary to the ecosystem, but that also threatens our very existence.

MARÍA MAGDALENA CAMPOS-PONS (BORN IN LA VEGA, MATANZAS, CUBA, 1959) explores memory, history, gender, and religion, particularly in relation to the legacy of slavery and its repercussions. Her work combines diverse artistic practices including photography, painting, sculpture, film, video, and performance in ways that are both personal and universal. Her work is autobiographical but contains references to broader Cuban and Caribbean histories. Through deeply poetic and often haunting imagery, Campos-Pons evokes stories of the transatlantic slave trade, indigo and sugar plantations, Catholic and Santeria religious practices, and revolutionary uprisings. Her polyglot heritage underpins much of her work, especially in her explorations of the colonization that has shaped Caribbean commodification and labor practices—some of the most harmful anthropogenic activities and a key component of the Anthropocene narrative.

ROBERT KAUTUK (BORN IN IQALUIT, NUNAVUT, 1984) uses a digital camera and drones to capture breathtaking scenes of the Canadian Arctic and intimate documentations of his Kangiqtugaapik community and their traditional practices. In addition to being a skilled photographer and researcher, Kautuk draws from a diverse skill set that comes from his experience as a hunter, Canadian Ranger, firefighter, and heavy equipment operator. Among his most well-known photographs is an image of hunters preparing two recently harvested walruses. The creatures were caught as part of a Piqqusilirivvik Inuit Cultural Learning Facility program that teaches young Inuit to hunt using both traditional and modern techniques. Kautuk uses technology to capture these rare and intimate experiences with landscapes that are historically inaccessible through conventional photographic techniques.

CARA ROMERO (CHEMEHUEVI, BORN IN INGLEWOOD, CALIFORNIA, 1977) combines fine art with documentary-style storytelling in complex and nuanced depictions of contemporary Indigenous culture. An enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, she is dedicated to conveying Native perspectives on issues of identity, representation, and environment. Her technically exquisite work reflects a diverse training in film, digital, fine art, journalism, editorial portraiture, and commercial photography. With this tool belt of skills, she stages theatrical compositions presenting both serious and playful social commentary on pressing contemporary issues. Romero’s practice also utilizes Photoshop as a means of visually communicating Indigenous worldviews by inserting magical realism and the supernatural into everyday life. In her 2019 Desert X exhibition in Coachella Valley, California, Romero created a series of billboards featuring young Native boys in traditional dress posed and playing among the rocks and windmills of the valley, effectively grounding passersby in what it means and feels like to be on Native land.

ANNA LÍNDAL (BORN IN HVAMMSTANGI, ICELAND, 1957) is an Icelandic multidisciplinary artist whose recent interest lies in the documentation of landscape transformation over time. Since 1997, she has participated in annual scientific expeditions with the Iceland Glaciological Society. During these trips, Líndal has recorded and visualized the geological changes of these icy terrains, including landmarks like Vatnajökull, one of Europe’s largest glaciers. Líndal’s practice draws from geography, mapping, and cartography to detail the tensions between nature and humanity, especially relationships between pioneer and land, and observers and objects of research. She investigates how much autonomy humans have over our own lives versus how much we must surrender to the forces of preexisting trends and patterns. She has written, “The project is also born of an interest in investigating the human quest for answers, and the need to understand the forces of nature.”

GAURI GILL (BORN IN CHANDIGARH, INDIA, 1970) is based in New Delhi and creates work rooted in collaboration, documentation, and photography as a way to resist dominant structures of power and preserve individual memory as a form of resistance. She has explained she is “interested in the human strategies through which people survive the precariousness: expressions of humor, resistance, and uncanny beauty.” Since 1999, Gill has focused intensely on marginalized rural communities in Rajasthan and, since 2013, on the Adivasi or Indigenous inhabitants of western India. There, she has built relationships with her subjects over an extended period of time, in an intimately collaborative effort to document their struggles as well as ways of being. In her project Fields of Sight, which began in 2013, Gill collaborates with renowned Adivasi artist Rajesh Vangad to combine her own photographic practice with Vangad’s knowledge of ancient Warli drawing. With Vangad recounting the complex history of his hometown of Ganjad, and his people, the resulting layered photographs present the artists’ connection to landscape and time, both physically and spiritually.

RAJESH VANGAD (BORN IN DAHANU, INDIA, 1975) is a Warli painter from Ganjad, Dahanu, an Adivasi village in coastal Maharashtra. Warli painting is a folk art form that Vangad’s community became revered for, with Vangad eventually developing his own successful studio practice. The Warli are Adivasi, known to be “scheduled tribes” in India whose land rights have been under constant threat, beginning with the British colonial rule and continuing into the present day, due to both political and environmental chaos. In recent collaborations with photographer Gauri Gill, Vangad’s Warli iconography has lent Gill’s landscapes a prolific intimacy and historical grounding in the cosmology of his community. The obsessive intricacy of Vangad’s brushstrokes superimposes Gill’s quietly profound photographed landscapes. His detailed figures demand patience and persistence from viewers, leading us to study, listen, and practice decolonization through looking.

JOIRI MINAYA (BORN IN NEW YORK, NEW YORK, 1990) is a multidisciplinary Dominican American artist who uses photo collage, self-participatory performance, public installation, and video to investigate the female body as it relates to identity, place, stereotype, culture, and the environment. In her work, Minaya exposes the persistent legacy of colonialism, how it informs the construction of identity, and how these constructions dictate perceptions of the self and others. Through a reflexive practice, she intentionally engages with the white, Western, male gaze and its accompanying expectations, only to subvert them in repeated reclamations of agency. Minaya is interested in what she describes as “the performativity of tropical identity as product: the performance of labor, decoration, beauty, leisure, service.” Her most recent work investigates a gendered but anonymous body that moves between domestic settings and the natural world.

GOHAR DASHTI (BORN IN AHVAZ, IRAN, 1980) makes large-scale photography that employs a uniquely theatrical aesthetic to explore the innate kinship between the natural world and human migrations. Her highly stylized photographic observations of human and plant life reveal her fascination with human-geographic narratives and how nature connects us to the numerous meanings of “home” and “displacement.” Her work raises questions about the immense, border-defying reach of nature—immune to cultural and political divisions—and the ways in which immigrants seek to reconstruct familiar topographies in a new, ostensibly foreign land. In her series Home, Dashti found abandoned homes in Mashhad, Iran, that belonged to people who left their houses for social or political reasons. She asks, “What happens to the environment when human populations are displaced or destroyed by war?” Dashti points to a fragile yet ambiguous future in the Middle East as natural elements, such as plants and wildflowers, literally reclaim these empty spaces as salubrious and politically neutral inhabitants.

AÏDA MULUNEH (BORN IN ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA, 1974) creates spectacular and highly staged images of women moving water across daunting yet elegant landscapes, as though in ritual performance. Though born in Ethiopia, she also spent formative years in Yemen, England, and Cyprus. Her itinerant upbringing grants an intimate appreciation for the various different cultures and environments that permeate her practice. In Muluneh’s Water Life series, she draws attention to water insecurity through a feminist lens, suggesting an optimistic, Afrocentric future rooted in maternal benevolence. Commenting on this project, she said, “I am deeply influenced by various traditional cultures, hence in a sense, I am bringing the past into the future through various forms.” Her historically rooted work reminds us that the cultural enterprises of colonialism and capitalism, as much as a transformation of the literal world around us, will be part of the future unfolding of the human story.

Artist bios credit: Claire L. Hutchinson, Duke University class of ’22