Paris Photo 2025

November 13-16, Le Grand Palais
For my second guest-edited selection with Der Greif: curated by my dear friend and internationally celebrated conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas, supported by Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung, Der Greif Issue 18, “Tomorrow is Today” confronts the “now” to shape a conscious future. What if tomorrow were already here? What if today was our last chance to choose love over hate, action over apathy, community over chaos?

Self-Portrait, Body Harvest, Umbilical #42, 40”x40” Organic Apple Orchard, Paonia, Colorado Bound by my stepfather’s welder’s mask, I am photographing myself “unraveling” in our community organic apple orchard. I improvise with the fruit trees as they, too, are bound, protected, distorted. Through word and image, stillness and movement, my intention is to disrupt the distinction between anthropocentrism and biophilia. Photographic performers (including myself) simultaneously splay our material bodies like a trace of memory as we compress ourselves into networks of human / non-human ecosystems. Gesturing into consciousness, my rapid performative primal movements echo the flash of colorful organic and synthetic textiles. They evoke the dynamism of nature and its continuous transformation that undermines deadly social and spiritual inertia embedded in advanced capitalist norms. The ritualistic narrative of the quotidian in relation to the sensual spectacle is heightened by the collision of bodies strewn both purposefully and haphazardly through interwoven architectures. Invoking tension among coercion, assimilation, and ritual, my ecosurrealist images unmask industrial society’s self-destructive fossil-fuel addictions while transforming convenience-culture consciousness. I intend my images and accompanying text to remind the viewer of shifting positions that require continual negotiations among anthropocentric expectations and the reality of our interdependency.