With the uprise of mobile devices, the infrastructural needs of the telecommunication industry have exploded, and since the 1980s, cell towers have started to fill the planet. The scenery changed dramatically when an antenna was transformed into an artificial pine tree for the first time in 1992. Since then, this kind of camouflage has evolved into a global phenomenon that raises fundamental questions about the relationship between humans and nature. The images from the series Second Nature focus on cell tower trees that became part of the Southern California landscape. The series depicts these artefacts of the digital age as, in Amy Clarke's words, a »societal preference for ›fake‹ aesthetics over ›ugly‹ reality«.

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Işık Kaya (1990) is a Turkish artist, currently based in the US. Her lens-based practice explores the ways in which humans shape the contemporary landscape. She focuses on traces of economic infrastructures to examine politics in built environments and how humanity’s dominance over nature finds its manifestation in everyday architecture. In her work, she erases the physical distance between existing structures and creates dense compilations of industrial fragments to construct new landscapes that look both alien and familiar at the same time. By framing her subjects exclusively at night, she aims to accentuate the artificial and uncanny qualities of urban environments.

Işık Kaya holds an MFA degree in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA degree in Photography & Videography from Istanbul Bilgi University, where she studied with a full scholarship.

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Thomas Georg Blank (1990) is a German artist. He first trained in cultural and media education focusing on photography before studying art in Karlsruhe and Mexico City. Moving between research and speculative interpretations, Blank explores how spatial and habitual representations of individual and collective imagination affect the world we’re living in and vice versa. By creating multidirectional, spatial narratives he offers spectators a space for reconfiguration and change of perspective.
He currently lives in Darmstadt (D) and San Diego (USA).