2026 Biennial
Natural Fictions
In an age marked by accelerated change and ecological instability, Natural Fictions proposes a slower, stranger, and more speculative gaze. The exhibition gathers artists who harness photography’s potential to imagine new relationships with the natural world—ones that are not bound by documentary fidelity but instead embrace transformation, fiction, and play. Through their work, the landscape becomes a site of experimentation and wonder, where speculative futures and unseen pasts coexist in surreal, poetic, and scientific inquiry.
The artists in this exhibition use the lens not merely to capture the world as it is, but to destabilize it. They fold time, alter perspective, and merge disciplines, constructing images that evoke geological duration, cosmic scale, and embodied mythologies. Some simulate environments that never existed, while others render familiar terrain uncanny through shifts in material, scale, or cultural reference. Their practices explore the camera as both a tool and collaborator in seeing beyond the visible and the known.
Natural Fictions considers how photography can resist linearity and certainty. What new narratives emerge when nature is approached as something invented as much as it is observed? What futures might become imaginable when science meets spirit or when perspective is shaped by play instead of conquest? Natural Fictions invites viewers to look sideways—and forward—at the environments we inhabit, inherit, and imagine.
Artists: Joshua Berg, Heesoo Kwon, Phillip Maisel, Sean McFarland, Mareiwa Miller, Ruby Que, Lydia Smith
Lydia Smith, Untitled (Burial Sites), 2024. Digital photograph, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist
Joshua Berg, Licking River, 2020. Archival inkjet print, 40 × 50 inches. Courtesy of the artist
Heesoo Kwon, Premolt 17, from Premolt, 2023. Inkjet print, lenticular overlay, lightbox, 32 × 22½ × 2 inches. Courtesy of the artist
Phillip Maisel, Emergence, New Mexico (4205), 2023–2025. Archival pigment prints collaged on newsprint, 45 × 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist
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