Reciprocal Ecology
Curated by Cassandra Klos
March 6 - April 26, 2026
Reciprocal Ecology examines the diverse ways photographers engage in cyclical relationships with the natural world. Through a range of immersive and exploratory practices—whether examining, infusing, submerging, transforming, inhaling, dissecting, or imbuing—each artist navigates their connection to nature in a unique manner. Some relinquish full control to the elements, while others embrace a dynamic, give-and-take dialogue. In every approach, there is an inherent trust: the act of creation exists in the interplay between artistic vision and surrender to the landscapes, waterways, and fauna that shape the work. Using both literal and metaphorical ecological markers, the natural world becomes the foundation for inquiry and expression. This exhibition seeks to explore themes of self-discovery, relational dynamics, and artistic experimentation, while acknowledging the reciprocal nature of our relationship with the environment.
Banner image: Chris Maliga
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About the Curator
Cassandra Klos (b. 1991) is a fine art and documentary photographer as well as an emerging curator whose work explores themes of science fiction, environmental change, and human futurisms. She holds a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and an MFA from Duke University’s Experimental and Documentary Arts program.
Her photographs have been exhibited internationally, including solo shows at the Griffin Museum of Photography and the Cassilhaus Collection and Gallery, and in festivals such as the Biel/Bienne Festival of Photography and the Lagos Photo Festival. Her editorial and documentary work has appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, TIME, National Geographic, and The New York Times, among others.
Klos’s curatorial practice includes exhibitions at the Cassilhaus Collection and Gallery, where she served as a curatorial intern, and at Duke University’s Kenan Institute of Ethics, where, as curatorial fellow, she designed Existence on the Periphery, an exhibition examining art in the Anthropocene. From 2020 to 2023, she was a curatorial assistant with Duke’s Archive of Documentary Arts, contributing to collection development, exhibition coordination, and archival preparation of new acquisitions.
About the Artists
Kelly Burgess is a project-based and editorial photographer based in rural Vermont, where she has been creating intimate photographic work for over a decade. Working primarily through collaborative processes with her subjects and the landscape, Kelly explores emotional narratives and personal experiences that form the thematic core of her photographic practice.
Her editorial work appears regularly in distinguished publications worldwide, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, and Yankee Magazine, among others. Kelly's personal projects have gained international recognition through exhibitions at venues such as the Arctic Arts Festival in Norway, MassArt Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
Beyond her commercial and fine art practice, Kelly serves as Executive Director of the Too Tired Project, a photography initiative created to support those struggling with mental health by providing a platform for collective creative expression. This work reflects her deeper commitment to using photography as a tool for community healing and connection.
Kelly accepts commissions for editorial assignments, travel documentation, and curatorial projects worldwide.
Jodie Mim Goodnough is a multidisciplinary artist based in Pawtucket, RI. She attended the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine in 2007 and received her MFA from Tufts University in 2013. Goodnough is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Artist Grant, a RISCA Grant in Photography, and a Tufts University Alumni Travel Grant, and has attended residencies at UCross Foundation, Wassaic Project,and ChaNorth, among others. Her work has been shown nationally in both solo and group exhibitions, including at Spring/Break Art Show in New York, ArtPort Kingston, and in the solo exhibition Biophilia at the Newport Art Museum in Newport, RI. Goodnough is currently an Associate Professor of Art in at Salve Regina University in Newport, RI.
Daesha Devón Harris is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose work probes the interstices of narrative, history, the politics of place, and the greater African Diaspora, intertwined with photography, mixed media, text, and video. The gentrification of her hometown of Saratoga Springs in New York, and its effect on the local Black community, has played a major role in both her advocacy and artwork.
Harris holds a BFA in Studio Art from the College of Saint Rose, and a MFA in Visual Art from the University at Buffalo, and her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States. Harris has received various awards, honors, and fellowships, and her work has been featured in a number of publications and books. Harris was a grantee of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation; a recipient of the Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship; a New York Foundation for the Arts Artist’s Fellow in Photography; and has participated in artist residencies across the country including the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; Yaddo; and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. She is also Visiting Artist-in-Residence and Director of the MDOCS Storytellers' Institute in the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative at Skidmore College and was named as one of the Royal Photographic Society’s Hundred Heroines.
Billy Hickey is a nature photographer from Massachusetts. In his personal work Billy makes stories about the intersections of the natural and human worlds covering topics such as falconry, light pollution, fireflies, and goats. Billy’s passion is learning about nature and sharing its wonders through photography with the hope to educate and inspire. In 2020 he graduated from the International Center of Photography and his project “How We Were” won first place in Lensculture’s Black and White Photography Awards. Billy’s work has been featured in STAT News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Carlisle Mosquito.
Alexandra Ionescu is an artist-researcher, photographer, and ecological restoration practitioner. Her work unfolds between a bookshelf, a pond, and overlooked urban landscapes—between knowing and unknowing—through constant, direct learning from the web of life.
Guided by curiosity and attunement, and open to nonlinearity and chance, her work invites a metamorphosis of perception, creating space for new meanings to emerge—new ways of seeing, knowing, relating, and caring.
Her practice centers on creating propensities: setting processes in motion and allowing them to unfold over time. Through photography, curated webinars and summits, and collaborative, site-specific projects—such as miniforests, floating wetlands that combine art with ecology, and advocacy around beaver-engineered landscapes—she deepens human participation in dynamic ecological processes while restoring the ecology of place.
You can often find her in the backyard tending native plants grown from seed or, when it rains, watching how water moves across surfaces.
Camilla Jerome (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist from the North Shore of Massachusetts whose practice explores the fluidity of the photographic medium. Working across autobiographical and documentary imagery, private video performance, installation, and experimental cameraless processes, Jerome examines the intersections of disability, visuality, time, beauty, and gender. Her work centers on lived experience as both subject and methodology, using self-revelation as a critical and material strategy.
Jerome holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA from Lesley Art and Design. She has presented solo exhibitions at the Worcester Art Museum, Gallery Kayafas in Boston, and the Mohegan Gallery at Three Rivers. Her work has been included in group exhibitions internationally at Galeria Valid Photo, Barcelona; CLAMP, New York; and WaterFire Arts Center, Providence, among others. She was named a Critical Mass Top 200 artist and a LENSCRATCH Student Work Top 26 to Watch in 2021 for her project Wounds Need Air. Her work has been published in LENSCRATCH, Fraction Magazine, and C41 Magazine, and is held in private, public, and institutional collections, including the Washington State Arts Commission.
Jordanna Kalman is a photographer from the Hudson Valley, NY. She has exhibited nationally, internationally and extensively online. Her practice entails finding the best way to express visually whatever it is she’s feeling at that particular time. Most recently she has been reckoning with her relationship with the male dominated history of photography and has self published a book spanning ten years worth of her series using the seminal text The History of Photography by Beaumont Newhall to house her work. In addition to her artistic practice Jordanna writes about inequalities in the photo industry and produces collaborative projects and publications in tandem. Jordanna works on many different things very slowly all at once.
Vanessa Leroy (b. 1996) is a photographer and photo editor based in New York, NY. She holds a BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Currently, she is a Photo Editor at NBC News + MSNBC. Formerly, she worked as an Associate Photo Editor at CNN, and as a Photo Editing Intern at NPR. She remains on the hunt for new ways of seeing, remembering, and altering the world through photography. She is drawn to image-making because of the power it holds to visualize and uplift the nuanced stories of marginalized people. She sees photography as a tool for social justice, and with it, she hopes to create worlds that people feel as though they can enter and draw from, as well as provide a look into an experience that they may not personally recognize. Clients include: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, STAT News, The Hechinger Report, Bloomberg, The Guardian, and The Huffington Post.
Chris Maliga is a New England based photographer whose work explores concepts of psychology, physical endurance, and the passage of time. Recent solo exhibitions include Lamenting Echo at Kingston Gallery and What Grows Without at Piano Craft Gallery in Boston. Maliga's work has part of group exhibitions nationally, most recently at the Media Art Gallery at Emerson College (Boston, MA), LightBox Photographic (Portland, OR), and the Photographic Resource Center (Cambridge, MA). His photographs have been featured in such publications as Light Journal and Pearl Press. He has worked as a teacher and mentor, as well as a professional darkroom printer. He is currently the Photography Studio Manager at School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Maliga has a BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an AA in Photography from the University of Maine at Augusta.
Owen McCarter (b.1998) is an artist living and working in the Northeastern US. His practice incorporates elements of analog photography, sculpture, and film. He received his B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design where he was awarded the Norman and Rose Avnet Fellowship Award, the Monson Residency Award, and the T.C. Colley Award for Excellence in Photography. He is currently pursuing his M.F.A at Cornell University.
Lisa McCarty is a photographer, filmmaker, and a naturalist-in-training. Equal parts forager & researcher, her projects are informed by long-term fieldwork, reading, & archive digging. Many of McCarty’s projects are inspired by unsung ecosystems or a lack of public records. Her current projects focus on endangered ecosystems in Greater Boston, including the Charles River Watershed. McCarty has participated in over 100 exhibitions and screenings at venues including Amherst College, Carnegie Museum of Art, Cassilhaus, the Emily Dickinson Museum, Fruitlands Museum, the Griffin Museum of Photography, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Microscope Gallery, the Nasher Museum of Art, and the Visual Studies Workshop. McCarty’s photographs have also been featured in a variety of international festivals including Noorderlicht, Internationale, Photoszene Köln, Picture Berlin, and Sören Kierkegaard in Images, while her moving images have been screened at the New York Film Festival, Cosmic Rays Film Festival, Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, Mimesis Documentary Festival, & Small File Media Festival. Her recent books include Transcendental Concord (Radius Books) and The Arboretum Aphorisms of Nathaniel Dorsky (San Francisco Cinematheque Press). McCarty received her MFA in Experimental & Documentary Arts from Duke University. She lives and works in Boston where she teaches at Northeastern University and frequents Walden Pond.
JaLeel Porcha is driven by their third-person re-analysis of what movements and gestures are created when experiencing instinctual hypervigilance within the black experience, including but not limited to situations of uncertainty, and how performance can create spaces of renegotiation for these second-nature movements. They are interested in whether these movements can be redeployed for subversive and survivalist actions in everyday living or in moments of conflict, and how. JaLeel develops work that allows a viewer to begin to unravel the levels at which pain exists not only in the body but also in the minds of black people. In their practice, they use performance as a time-based medium to create layered spaces for imaginative thinking and confrontation through various media. JaLeel received their BFA in Photography & Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Visual Arts from Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of Art.
Sandra Stark is represented by the Anderson Yezerski Gallery, Boston. Stark did her Undergraduate work in Photography at R.I.T and the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester where she worked at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in the Education Dept. lecturing on the history of photography and collections before going to do Graduate work at Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia.
She recently retired from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts where she taught full-time in the Photography Department for 40 years and was granted Emerita status. She has had exhibitions at the Yezerski Gallery, Boston; Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston; National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian, Washington, DC; Houston Center of Photography; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA; Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; Harvard University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. ; Columbia University, NY. and University of NH Art Museum.
She has received numerous grants and has been a visiting artist at Princeton University, Rhode Island School of Design, San Francisco Camerawork, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Harvard's Fogg Museum; and numerous private collections. She has enjoyed three residencies at The MacDowell Colony, NH.
Stark is also a professional fiddle player who has played with well-known old-time bands on the East and West Coasts including a stint with R. Crumb and The Cheap Suit Serenaders at the California Folk Festival; The Chicken Chokers; Any Old Time Stringband and Primitive Characters.
John Tully is a photographer whose work explores sense of place through abstract themes of home and identity. Growing up as a military brat, his family moved frequently across the United States, an experience that later shaped his photography and desire to find his roots. He has an enduring fascination with the concept of home through both personal introspection and the idea of connections that present a layered history of individuals and communities.
His ongoing work and book project, NEVERLAND, offers a peripheral glimpse into the White Mountains and surrounding rural communities, serving as both a love letter to the area and a personal exploration into the meaning of home, memory, and change.