Altered Ecology

Photography by DU alumna Kari Varner, 2025 Kelleher Visiting Artist

On view March 13 through April 27, 2025

The echoes of industry and human presence are inscribed upon the landscape. This body of work explores these traces, along with the ecological and economical value we assign to altered environments. Drawing from the environment as subject and material, images are formed from the material enacting change in the land and water. In this alchemical process of creation, the photograph emerges from an altered ecology.

I form relationships with landscapes by wandering and foraging for images and plants alike. Coming away with both in hand, the two are intimately tied. Invasive plants are conscripted into the process of making. Though labeled as undesirable and worthy of eradication, the emergence of the photograph is reliant upon these plants.

In other works, the photograph is not harvested but grown. Images of poultry plants that contribute significantly to algal blooms are formed directly from algae. The photograph requires a week of daily care through the pipetting of nitrogen-based fertilizer, the same substance contributing to fresh and salt water dead zones.

By using these materials, I become implicated in these processes of environmental alteration. Often the material experiments I undertake seem a reflection of our experiments on the environment itself. How much can the material or land tolerate before it ceases to be recognized, before its identity is irrevocably altered or lost.