Second Nature / Reconfiguring Nature / Artist Bios

ELENA DAMIANI (BORN IN LIMA, PERU, 1979) challenges our understanding of the present moment by reaching into the past, where she transforms found materials like books, film, and public records into photographic collages, sculptures, videos, and installations. Her work revitalizes subjects like geology, archaeology, and cartography as a means of exploring historical representations of remote landscapes in the Americas. She aims to emphasize the geological and temporal ambiguity of materials when they are extracted from their original contexts. Her work also references historical instances of catastrophe by incorporating inorganic substances, like travertine, that serve as evidence of such events. Through a uniquely sculptural reworking of materials, Damiani questions her own position within structures of greater magnitude and constructs worlds in which numerous topographies and timelines exist simultaneously.

ROSEMARY LAING (BORN IN BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA, 1959–2024) created photo-based work featuring performers and physical installations painstakingly arranged for the camera. Drawing on both the histories of a place and the conditions that create its contemporary circumstance, she posed questions about postcolonial perspectives on the occupation and ownership of land. Laing staged cinematic interventions in culturally and historically resonant locations across Australia. Her series one dozen unnatural disasters in the Australian landscape is set in the red plains in Western Australia on the lands of the Wirrimanu Aboriginal community of Balgo. The dramatic landscape is interspersed with domestic furniture covered in the region’s red sand, exploring the dichotomy between ancient and modern, geological and anthropogenic, and Aboriginal and colonial.

TOSHIO SHIBATA (BORN IN TOKYO, JAPAN, 1949) is best known for his large-format photographs of human feats of civil engineering in collision with unpopulated, rural landscapes. He began his career as a painter and printmaker before pivoting to photography and gradually honing in on the Japanese landscape as his muse. His photographs show the dynamism and grace of water spilling through constructed channels, the fluid paths of highways carved into mountainsides, and vast cliffs and landscapes transformed by an interweaving of human engineering. His practice emphasizes the conflicting human capacities for both creative magnificence and unsettling destruction—especially in relation to the environment. Shibata’s work bears witness to an increasingly constructed Japanese landscape, striking a unique harmony between appreciation and forewarning.

LETHA WILSON (BORN IN HONOLULU, HAWAII, 1976) is dedicated to material experimentation that challenges the two-dimensionality of traditional photography. She expands the visual and physical dimensions of photography by bending, smashing, and folding large-scale photographs in combination with materials like steel, aluminum, wood, concrete, and vinyl. She prints images of natural landscapes onto her sculptures, embeds them in the surface of her works, and manipulates them in various unexpected compositions. Her unique fabrication processes physically reconfigure nature, and some of her recent work is the most sculptural yet—reaching out from walls and resting on pedestals. The natural world is both the subject and content of her work, serving as a metaphor for the role of landscape in myths of renewal and possibility.

HAYLEY MILLAR BAKER (GUNDITJMARA AND DJABWURRUNG, BORN IN MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA, 1990) was a painter for a decade before transitioning to photography, film, and collage. She uses these media to interrogate and abstract stories founded on southeastern Aboriginal existence—drawing from her Gunditjmara bloodline and examining the roles our identities play in translating and conveying our experiences. The meticulous layering of her imagery creates histories and landscapes in which disparate times, cultures, and transformations coexist. Millar Baker’s stratified, elusory imagery emphasizes temporal fluidity and connection to identity. Her practice examines how memory and identity are neither linear nor concrete and highlights Indigenous experiences of place, time, storytelling, and the intergenerational passing down of that knowledge.

DAVID BENJAMIN SHERRY (BORN IN STONY BROOK, NEW YORK, 1981) creates vast, large-format landscapes of the West that recall those by nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors such as Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams. Sherry is a self-described “nostalgic futurist,” who simultaneously references the past and looks toward the future. He sees his presence as a queer man making images in rugged and rural terrain as a performative process. By embracing this aspect of his identity, he is able to present an alternate to the heteronormative precedence set for our understanding of ecologies and environmentalism—thus using his queer identity as a strategy for conservation. Working in large-scale analog film processes and more recently in painting, Sherry’s sweeping monochromatic views are both seductive and cautionary, reinvigorating the American western landscape tradition by underscoring the fragility and vulnerability of these lands. He has written, “These photographs represent resistance, self-determination, and optimism—core American values—imperiled as the land itself.”

TODD GRAY (BORN IN LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, 1954) combines images from his vast personal archive with African and European landscapes to explore dynamics of colonial power and racial identity. In the early 1970s, he began photographing rock and R&B artists, eventually shooting more than one hundred album covers and becoming Michael Jackson’s personal photographer. Now he draws from this commercial portfolio and works between Los Angeles and Ghana to reveal the diasporic dislocations and cultural connections linking Western hegemony with West Africa. In Gray’s 2019 series Euclidean Gris Gris, he physically layers images of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European gardens—products of the Enlightenment—with those of West and southern African rural scenes, along with constellations and galaxies on top of one another. By drawing these connections visually, the artist is proposing a sculptural-photographic and subversive reconsideration of the harmful practices that emerged from Enlightenment philosophies, many of which fundamentally altered the natural world and, it has been argued, contributed to the Anthropocene.

YANG YONGLIANG (BORN IN SHANGHAI, CHINA, 1980) originally studied traditional Chinese painting (Shan Shui) and calligraphy before attending the China Academy of Art. Upon graduation, he began his artistic career with skills in visual art, photography, painting, and videography and with the ambitious goal of “creating new forms of contemporary art.” He has since done just that, using digital photography like paint to fill stunning landscapes with recognizably constructed forms of urbanization. Through digital manipulation, he transforms traditional Chinese landscape paintings with eerie contemporary imagery of decaying skyscrapers, cars, and other industrial signifiers. Yang’s mysterious, grayscale work leans into economic, environmental, and social issues by creating a dystopian vision of our future if industrialization continues unchecked.

SIM CHI YIN (BORN IN SINGAPORE, 1978) uses photography, moving image, text, performance, and archival intervention in her artistic practice. Deep research into issues of history, memory, conflict, migration, and extraction characterize her work. In her practice, she pairs intense research with prolific storytelling, granting insight into Sim’s knowledge of the past and visions of the future. For example, she has engaged in a nearly decade-long exploration of the movement of sand (one of the world’s most highly traded commodities) from rivers in poor countries in Southeast Asia to newly constructed urban landscapes in Singapore, Malaysia, and southern China. In 2017, she was commissioned as the Nobel Peace Prize photographer and created a solo show composed of photography and video installation exploring nuclear weapons and their environmental consequences. These photographs were exhibited in the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway.

THOMAS STRUTH (BORN IN GELDERN, GERMANY, 1954) creates large-scale photographs characterized by a uniquely human attention to detail, often using the public as subject matter. He is best known for his series Museum Photographs: monumental color images of people viewing canonical works of art in museums. Struth believes that “the impulse to make art includes the desire to address others,” so including the public itself in his images comes naturally. By exploring places of the human imagination, Struth examines landscapes of invention, technology, and the ways in which humans capture, contain, and reconfigure nature for pedagogical and entertainment reasons.

NOÉMIE GOUDAL (BORN IN PARIS, FRANCE, 1984) builds and documents elaborate constructions to showcase illusion by photography or film, and the organic as “invaded” by the human-made. Goudal aims to understand landscape by approaching it from multiple directions, blending traditional photographic technique with physical manipulation of the environment. She is interested in exploring forensic histories of geological time, or “deep time,” allowing the land to explain itself through its own history rather than through the history of humanity. In her Les Mécaniques series, the artist creates new landscapes from existing ones by inserting fragments of mirrors into the land and rephotographing them. Her work encourages the viewer to think more consciously about how time—in this case, geological “deep time”—shapes our perceptions of nature.

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