Chemistry, Extraction and Sustainability

With Pablo Larios

Pablo Larios is an author, critic, and International Editor at Artforum. He has written widely on contemporary art and visual culture and is the commissioning editor of Artforum’s November 2025 feature section on the future of photography, which includes contributions by Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili, Christian Scheidemann, Thomas Demand, Florian Ebner, Roxana Marcoci, and Jeff Wall, amongst others.

Born in Honduras and raised in the United States, he lives in Berlin.

Dionne Lee 

Dionne Lee is an artist working across photography, collage, and video. She is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow. Her practice explores power, survival, and personal history in relation to the American landscape.

Major recent solo exhibitions include the outdoor installation between the falling leaf and the surface of rock at Storm King Art Center (2025).

Born in New York, she lives and works in Columbus, Ohio, US, on the unneeded territories of the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Delaware, Miami, Peoria, Seneca, Wyandotte, Ojibwe and Cherokee peoples.

Michelle Henning

Michelle Henning is Chair in Photography and Media at the University of Liverpool. A writer and theorist, she is the author of Museums, Media and Cultural Theory (Open University Press, 2005) and Photography: The Unfettered Image (Routledge, 2018). Her latest book, A Dirty History of Photography (University of Chicago Press, 2025), examines photography’s chemical and material foundations.

Henning is also an artist-designer, known for her award-winning album covers for musicians such as PJ Harvey. Her research and practice address the entanglement of photographic technology, matter, and cultural memory.

She lives and works between Liverpool and London.

Aspen Mays

Aspen Mays is an artist whose work investigates photography’s relationship to science, chance, and material transformation. Drawing on backgrounds in anthropology and photography, she often uses expired film, found negatives, or discarded scientific materials. Her recent projects have focused on astronomy archives, obsolete imaging technologies, and the poetic potential of photographic error.

Mays’s solo exhibitions include Ten Gallon Sunflower (2016) and California Dreaming (2018) at Higher Pictures in New York and Toward Infinite Limits at the San Jose State Museum of Art in California in 2019. She is Associate Professor of Art and Chair of Photography at California  College  of  the  Arts in San Francisco.

Mays lives and works in San Francisco and London.