Julianne Nash

Country
United States
City
Brooklyn NY

The images submitted are from the series “Ennuipocalypse”, a newly developed term  by climate scientists to describe our rate of extinction. While the media often depicts extinction to be occurring at an excruciatingly slow day to day time scale, the rate at which our planet is changing on a geological scale is anything but slow. I am interested in creating imagery that does not necessarily relate to what has become our vernacular for the climate crisis, rather focusing primarily on everyday occurrences in the landscape that hint to my greater anxieties of the climate crisis.

I combine individual high resolution photographs of the natural environment using both algorithms and digital compositing techniques to create photographs that teeter on the edge of  reality; images hinting to our greater ineffable climate crisis on a micro-scale. The manipulation and loss of digital information in this series is a larger metaphor for our global ecosystem, of which is degrading at a preternatural rate. I’m interested in the disquiet side of this transformation such as, invasive species slowly changing natural symbiosis leading to areas devoid of biodiversity and beaches slowly disappearing, leaving behind only the remains of life.

Each image is created using anywhere from five to a hundred individual photographs that I combine together through algorithms inherent to photoshop or traditional compositing techniques, often both. I start each image by finding something within the landscape (invasive vines, debris from a landslide, an animal carcass, etc.) and taking hundreds of images from all angles, I then create a sketch to determine the overall shape I envision for the work. The process of physically creating these collages is much more reminiscent of creating a painting than it is to a photograph; I slowly work through combining photographs for days, sometimes weeks, to create an image that has not only has an emotional draw to it but one that also will leave the viewer questioning their own realities. Each photograph is then almost completely desaturated, leaving only a small amount of color behind, to further connect our disappearing planet to these images as they both seemingly fading themselves, to play into our collective design of the apocalypse — dark, depleted, and disappearing.

Permafrost Melt (18 Images), 2022

This photograph is only a part of the overarching series "Ennuipocalypse", so please visit www.juliannenash.com to view the many other images in the series. 

This photograph specifically was created from 18 different images of a forest in Alaska in which the bitch trees were are wilting and falling over due to permafrost melt. Because their roots are shallow in the frozen ground, as the climate warms the roots have nothing to hold onto, causing the entire forest to slowly change. The trees dies, and smaller pioneer species cover the forest floor.