Looking at representations of nature in consumer culture, this series attempts a biocentric reading of the 600-800+ page September issue of American Vogue. By photographing “nature” in the pages of the mass-produced print magazine, the work foregrounds that which typically serves as background or supporting scenery in the glossy drama of elite consumerism. By shifting the focus from top model to Boxwood, designer handbag to Hosta leaf, the work explores the ways in which nature is used to market, ameliorate, codify, mythologize and make sublime these global economies. Reframed, the background becomes the central, mediated field; inhabiting the privileged and precarious position of both image subject and object of desire. As subject, nature gives rise to its own sublimated narratives, as object it complicates our desire.

Visual artist and writer Yedda Morrison is a founding member of the artist/writer’s collaborative The Collective Task (www.collectivetask.com) and a founding editor of Tripwire, A journal of Poetics (www.tripwirejournal.com). Her books include; Darkness (Make Now Press, 2012), Girl Scout Nation (Displaced Press, 2008) and Crop (Kelsey Street Press, 2003). Her work has been anthologized in Against Expression (Northwestern University Press), I’ll Drown My Book (Les Figues Press), Bay Poetics (Faux Press), Kindergarde (Black Radish), and most recently in Reprint Appropriation (&) Literature (LUXBOOKS). Morrison is represented by Republic Gallery in Vancouver, BC. She lives and works in San Francisco.