Amos Eno Gallery, a non-profit, artist-run gallery, is pleased to present Flora non Grata, the inaugural solo exhibition by artist Julianne Nash. The exhibition will be on view from June 19 to July 27, 2025, with an opening reception on Friday, July 20th, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the gallery at 191 Henry St. on New York’s Lower East Side. Works will also be available to view online via Artsy.

 

Coinciding with the release of her first monograph by the same name (Snap Collective, 2025), Flora non Grata encompasses nearly ten years of the artist’s photographic explorations into personal and ecological grief. Grappling with the conventions of vanitas and isolation, Nash creates images that are in a constant state of evolution – akin to the fragile ecosystems she seeks to memorialize. Blurring the boundaries between documentary, artifice, and perception, Nash constructs mutable landscapes where nothing is certain. Images explode with vivid color or collapse into near monochrome as they rest uneasily in a moment of instability on the edge of collapse. Individual elements—rocks, leaves, blades of grass—are rendered with sharp clarity, full of crisp lines and delineation while others blur into abstraction, alive with mystery. Nash’s landscapes are composed through agglomerated digital processes—stacked images, layered focuses, color distortions, digital compression. Her methods are both precise, yet unpredictable. Moving pieces of landscape around the digital plane, the artist allows for elements of serendipitous discovery to occur between layers, each building upon the last. 

 

The heart of the exhibition is a 12-foot dye sublimation print on celtic cloth, “Juniper and Sagebrush (22 Images)”. The hostile aridity of the desert envelops viewers through the combination of infrared photographs and digitally painted golden hues. Desert landscapes are deeply vulnerable to subtle changes as all species vie for limited resources—a sobering reminder amid the accelerating spread of desertification. The juniper tree, twisting on a cellular level in response to hardship, becomes a metaphor for both ecological adaptation and human resilience. This desert is not empty but charged with silent struggle; a vanishing place marked by its refusal to remain still. 

 

In parallel to this sits a triptych, Artemisia Tridentata, that focuses on sagebrush at various times of day. As a sacred plant for many Indigenous peoples of North America, the sagebrush’s history is fraught, a constant tension written into the bones of the desert landscape. The job of the sagebrush is regeneration: a keystone species growing out of the erosion-carved, cracked earth, made brittle from poor alkaline soils where few other species can survive while providing water to those that do with its tendril-like roots. Its vast range can be deceiving—the loss of sagebrush habitat is accelerating, and thus the species it provides habitat for. As cheatgrass and other non-native species increase, warmer conditions spark more fires with more frequency and the ecosystem becomes ever-more unstable. While we, much like the sagebrush, may have roots strong enough to endure crisis and regrow, the frequency and intensity of our changing systems make both our future and the future of the ‘sagebrush sea’ precarious.

 

The exhibition also presents earlier work by Nash, including lenticular prints that render image-stacked layers on shifting focal planes. In “Grandpa’s Flowers Post Mortem  (Focus Stack, 74 Images, Re-stacked 5 Times Upon Itself)”, Nash compresses the life cycle of funerary flowers down to a chaotic yet orderly frame indecipherable to logic. “[A] bouquet of errors,” Lyle Rexer writes of Julianne’s floral arrangements in his book Fifteen Pictures to Understand Photography, later saying:

“These make for an image that is both static and unstable, superficially perspicuous and incoherent. […] Wedded to a lens-based viewpoint, audiences find that viewpoint undercut by Nash’s flowers, and with it the dual sense of the subject – the subject being looked at and the subject doing the looking. The experience eludes description, like going blind. Something is there to be seen, but what it is and how it is done cannot be grasped visually.” 

 

A selection of Nash’s most somber series Ennuipocalypse fills the gallery’s back room with a desaturated void of darkened landscapes.  These works present stark realities—seemingly healthy wetlands, disappearing glaciers, dead forests—all in an act of vanishing, both epidemiologically and visually. A cold, unflinching examination of landscapes under threat, the artist contemplates extinction on both micro and geologic scales. Nash questions our collective emotional dissonance of climate collapse, inspired by David Wallace-Wells's “climate’s kaleidoscope” from The Uninhabitable Earth:

“This is climate’s kaleidoscope: we can be mesmerized by the threat directly in front of us without ever perceiving it clearly. Climate devastation is everywhere you look, and yet nowhere in focus, as though we are displacing our anxieties about global warming by restaging them in theaters of our own design and control.”

 

The exhibition concludes with Nash’s most recent piece: “Drill, Baby, Drill” a dye-sublimation print on satin, created in response to the current administration’s rollback of climate protections. Land, sea and sky collapse in on themselves into a swirling, flooded frame, shimmering with the movement of gallery visitors as the satin fabric moves gently with the air. The surface effect evokes a water-like shine to the already flooded frame, underscoring the precariousness of our present ecological moment. Climate change has become an environmental uncanny—everywhere and nowhere, omnipresent yet out of focus. Nash’s images don’t offer certainty, but ask you to sit with ambiguity, to feel into the multiplicity of the fragile living world and, perhaps, to reattune your senses to its rhythms, suggesting that to perceive is to care.

 

About Artist

Julianne Nash received her MFA in Photography Video and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts (2018) and her BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2013). Julianne’s work has been exhibited widely in galleries such as: The Wassaic Project, Griffin Museum of Photography, Robert Klein Gallery, et al.; and has been published in magazines such as Create!, Dear Dave, Meregoat Magazine, and more. Most notably, Julianne’s work was published in Lyle Rexer’s acclaimed book, “The Critical Eye: Fifteen Pictures to Understand Photography” (Intellect Press 2019).  Julianne’s work has lead her to participate in multiple climate-focused events such as: “Lost in the Woods: Grief and the Ennuipocalypse”, a Death Cafe she hosted with the Greenwood Cemetery; and the Creative Climate Awards 2024 at the Human Impacts Institute, which included a CCA Arts & Action Chat: “From Climate Anxiety & Grief to Action”.  Julianne has participated in residencies at The Montello Foundation (NV), The Eastern Frontier Society’s Norton Island Residency (ME), and SEAR: Searsport Eco-Art Residency with Parsonage Gallery (ME).