Natural Fictions at The Carnegie brings together artists who treat photography less as evidence than as a way of testing how the natural world is seen, framed and imagined. On view from September 30, 2026 to March 6, 2027, the exhibition is curated by Lindsay Albert of KADIST and Sso-Rha Kang of The Carnegie.
Rather than presenting landscape as a fixed subject, the show approaches it as something unstable and open to invention. The works included in Natural Fictions move between observation and fiction, using the camera to unsettle familiar ideas about place, scale and time. Mountains, terrain and atmospheres appear less as straightforward scenes than as spaces shaped by speculation, invention and visual play.
The exhibition arrives at a moment when ecological strain and rapid change have made natural systems feel harder to read. Against that backdrop, these artists turn away from the documentary certainty often expected of photography. Some construct environments that never existed. Others shift perspective or material in ways that make the familiar seem slightly off balance. The result is imagery that feels at once scientific, poetic and surreal.
Artists including Joshua Berg, Heesoo Kwon, Phillip Maisel, Sean McFarland, Mareiwa Miller, Ruby Que and Lydia Smith draw on different approaches, but share an interest in stretching photography beyond simple description. Their work suggests that nature is not only observed but also interpreted, staged and reimagined. In place of linear narratives, the exhibition offers layered scenes where geological time, embodied myth and speculative futures sit side by side.
Natural Fictions asks what becomes visible when the landscape is treated as a site of construction rather than conquest. That question gives the exhibition its relevance, and its quiet force.
Image: Licking River, 2020. Archival inkjet print, 40 × 50 inches. Courtesy of the artist © Joshua Berg
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