Second Nature / Toxic Sublime / Artist Bios

JOÃO CASTILHO (BORN IN BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL, 1978) is interested in using photography not just to report and inform, but to help inspire new ways to think about the world’s future. He is especially interested in the Anthropocene and how it leads us to a tipping point between the imperative of progress and its destructive power. His photography, videos, sculptures, and installations are inspired by cinema, literature, popular culture, and landscapes of the Brazilian Cerrado (tropical savanna). In the series from which Morro vermelho (Red Hill) (2019) comes, Castilho establishes a relationship between the uninterrupted transformation of the territory south of Belo Horizonte and the extraterritorial layers of the mining process. Displacements, collapses, debris, and ruptures create entropic landscapes that coexist with sacred images, ceiling paintings, soapstone sculptures, gold-covered altars, and contemporary art installations.

ADRIÁN BALSECA (BORN IN QUITO, ECUADOR, 1989) produces video and photographic documentations, performs site-specific interventions, and makes multimedia installations that explore colonial and extractivist practices in South America and across the globe. His work draws from Ecuador’s political past and present to investigate environmental issues such as oil spills, Amazonian rubber extraction, and the tension between traditional craft production and industrial manufacturing of goods. Balseca frequently begins with commonplace objects such as lamps, cars, and sewers, then creates work spurred by an exploration of the manufacturing systems through which they come to be. His body of work reveals a growing index of the signs and symbols of numerous ecosystems in the region, either natural (like Amazonia or the Galapagos Islands) or sociopolitical. This methodical documentation serves as a meditation on environmental, economic, and social devastation in the name of multinational capital production.

MATTHEW BRANDT (BORN IN LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, 1982) produces large-scale photographs in collaboration with the environment through labor- intensive processes that often incorporate the physical matter of the subject itself. For example, in his Vatnajökull series, Brandt took his photographs of Iceland’s Vatna ice field and used fire and heat to create a range of tonalities and blistered, topographic surfaces unique to each image. Inspired by canonical landscape photographs of the American West, Brandt travels across these varied terrains, photographing and collecting material samples to incorporate into his work. His multifaceted documentation of different environments closes the gap between subject and medium. He revels in the alchemy and physicality of image making, experimenting with the effects of various materials—like lake water or crushed honeybees—on the development process.

EDWARD BURTYNSKY (BORN IN ST. CATHARINES, CANADA, 1955) is known for large-format, intricately detailed, aerial photographs that depict landscapes transformed by industrialization. Humans are rarely pictured, but when they are, they appear small as if overwhelmed by the immenseness of their surroundings and the scale of what they’ve caused. Because of its grandeur, his work is often connected to the philosophical concept of the sublime—that feeling of overwhelming awe and vitality you get when in the presence of nature. However, he sees his work as tapping into an updated idea of the sublime: an overwhelming technological, as opposed to natural, force. His portfolio of photography and documentary film represents more than forty years of dedication to bearing witness to the impact of humans on the planet, creating imagery that reveals the scars left by industrial capitalism while simultaneously establishing an aesthetic for environmental devastation.

DANILA TKACHENKO (BORN IN MOSCOW, RUSSIA, 1989) uses photography to capture unseen realities in environments by directing his gaze toward the periphery. He focuses on people and places in the margins, from abandoned buildings to hermits living outside civilization. In his Acid series, he photographed restricted sites in Russia at night using projectors with a green filter to expose and identify places contaminated by radiation. The resulting images depict an eerie, glowing, toxic world. The series reveals the often invisible threats that are not only capable of damaging or destroying the human body, but also able to completely transform the environment. Tkachenko’s Acid photographs are all the more haunting because they evoke the fact that anthropogenic activity—nuclear power—has been identified by the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) as the “Golden Spike” of the Anthropocene.

INKA LINDERGÅRD (BORN IN SALTVIK, ÅLAND, FINLAND, 1985) AND NICLAS LINDERGÅRD (BORN IN SANDVIKEN, SWEDEN, 1984) began working together in 2007 to create primarily photo-based works of art in two and three dimensions. Their work rejuvenates traditional landscape photography by leaning into the materiality of the photographic medium. The Lindergårds explore and exaggerate the ways in which photography renders contemporary conceptions of nature through the stylization of landscape. Their brightly colored photographs, manipulated in the moment of exposure, directly address the viewer experience by bringing attention to a culture of aestheticized and digitally mediated interactions with nature. The artist duo’s characteristically playful and unconventional approach to landscape photography produces hyperreal utopias that synthesize the beauty, kitsch, and visual desire found in imagery of the natural world.

CAMILLE SEAMAN (SHINNECOCK, BORN IN HUNTINGTON, NEW YORK, 1969) makes photographs with a concentration on the fragile and fleeting polar regions, creating landscape photography on the verge of portraiture as each iceberg appears to have its own spirit and personality. These stunning and intimate images break down any notions of separation between humans and nature. Born to a Native American (Shinnecock) father and African American mother, Camille’s sense of connection with landscape stems from growing up on Long Island and in New York City, not far from the Shinnecock Indian Nation. Her grandfather taught her how the Shinnecock saw the natural world, a knowledge and reverence vital to her international practice. Of her polar work, Seaman says, “I’m just there to press the shutter. I understand that it’s a calling. Sometimes I’m weeping as I take the picture, because I feel like this is all I can do: push this button.”

SAMMY BALOJI (BORN IN LUBUMBASHI, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO, 1978) uses photography to reveal the histories, present-day realities, and contradictions inherent in the formation of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His Mémoire (Memory) series explores the postcolonial decline of the DRC’s once-prosperous mining region by superimposing archival images of European officials and Congolese laborers who built the mine’s once-imposing industrial sites onto contemporary photographs that highlight their current state of decline. Baloji’s artistic concern is rooted in daily life in the DRC, aiming to retell its history from the perspective of its people. By referencing histories of Western imperialism, Baloji highlights colonial greed and postcolonial disillusionment but also alludes to the ongoing effects of predatory global capitalism on both the people and the land.

MEGHANN RIEPENHOFF (BORN IN ATLANTA, GEORGIA, 1979) uses the cyanotype—a photographic printing process developed in sunlight—to create camera-less photographs in collaboration with the landscape. Her work stems from a fascination with our human relationships to time, impermanence, landscape, and the sublime. Riepenhoff coats large sheets of paper with home- made cyanotype emulsion and then drapes them along the shore, across branches, or packed in snow. Like a fossil record, rain and sleet, tide and current, wind and sediment all leave physical inscriptions through direct contact with the photographic materials. Her most recent series, Ice, features work created in freezing waters. Because of their photochemical makeup, the pieces are never wholly processed and will continue to slowly respond to the changing environments that they encounter over time.

LÉONARD PONGO (BORN IN LIÈGE, BELGIUM, 1988) is an experimental documentary photographer and filmmaker who splits his time between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Brussels, Belgium. Pongo has developed a style that incorporates snapshot, diary, and abstraction steeped in local cosmogonies and intended as a means of overturning Western views of the DRC. He is interested in using beauty as a tool for dignity without reducing the immenseness of land to mere aesthetic candy. His project Primordial Earth serves as a visual allegory that presents the varied natural landscape of the DRC as a character with its own will and power. In this sense, Primordial Earth challenges the Western centering of humanity and linear time by excluding most human presence, thus underscoring the ambiguousness of humankind to the future of nature.

ACACIA JOHNSON (BORN IN ANCHORAGE, ALASKA, 1990) is a photographer and writer based in Alaska whose work focuses on issues of the environment, conservation, and anthropological themes in the Arctic and Antarctica. Interested in the deep connections between people and place, she has made more than fifty expeditions to polar regions as both a photographer and a guide. She strives to use these trips to cultivate awe and empathy for these remote regions during a time of rapid change. Her series Polaris (2013) bears witness to otherworldly occurrences in the wilderness of Alaska and Iceland. In considering her expeditions and projects, she writes, “I contemplate how the dynamic contrasts and fleeting elements of the Far North impart a heightened sense of being alive, and reflect upon the peculiar combination of wonder, fear, and respect that the landscape invokes.”

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