Join us at the Griffin Museum for an afternoon presentation with photographers Jessica Hays and Melinda Hurst Frye as they discuss their current exhibition and the ideas shaping their work.
Bringing together two distinct photographic practices, as Above so Below explores the vision and questions around land use, stewardship, and shared resources. Hayes and Frye consider how we inhabit the landscape -- how land holds memory, labor, extraction, care, and consequence. Through their individual approaches, they reflect on the ways environments are shaped by human presence and policy, and how those decisions reverberate through communities and generations.
In dialogue with one another, their work invites close looking and thoughtful engagement, asking viewers to consider not only what is seen, but what is sustained, altered, or depleted. During this special presentation, the artists will speak about their creative processes, the evolution of their projects, and how concerns around land, ownership, and responsibility inform their practice.
Following the panel discussion, a reception will follow.
Murmuration, USA, Palouse, WA, Crows fly across the highway in thick orange smoke. 2020© Melinda Hurst Frye
as Above, so Below brings together the photographic practices of Melinda Hurst Frye and Jessica Hays converging around the poetic interplay of environment, memory, and the cycles that shape both landscape and psyche. The exhibition's title references an ancient axiom suggesting that what occurs on one scale is reflected on another--a concept echoed in environmental thought that emphasizes interdependence, reciprocity, and responsibility within the natural world.
Biologist E.O. Wilson noted that biodiversity is the key to the maintenance of the world as we know it. This perspective provides a useful context for the exhibition, where attention to both visible and often overlooked forms of life shapes how the photographs are made and experienced.
Melinda Hurst Frye's work embodies close observation and ecological awareness. Using a flatbed scanner to record the forest floor in extraordinary detail, she reveals the complex networks of fungi, plant matter, and soil that support life above ground. Her images challenge traditional notions of landscape by centering what is typically unseen, reminding us that the health of visible ecosystems depends on fragile, interconnected systems beneath our feet. By shifting attention to what lies underfoot, Frye asks us to reconsider scale, value, and our relationship to the natural world.
Jessica Hays approaches the landscape as both ecological reality and lived experience. Her photographs engage environments shaped by climate change, wildfire, and personal history, reflecting humanity's innate connection to the natural world and the emotional consequences of its disruption. Through alternative photographic processes and layered visual strategies, Hays considers how land holds memory and how environmental change reverberates through the body and the self.
Together, Frye and Hays move between the intimate and the expansive, the microscopic and the monumental. As Above, so Below invites viewers to consider how photographic images can reveal connection--between land and self, past and present--and encourage a deeper awareness of our place within the systems that sustain us.