Fractured Lands
The Halide Project
September 5 - October 16, 2025
Ella Morton, Dafna Talmor
Photography holds within it the creative power to transform and heal. Through the medium, artists can interrogate, reinterpret, and re-present reality in a manner that often requires that the original material or concept be destroyed in order for something new and transcendent to arise.
Both artists in Fractured Lands – Ella Morton and Dafna Talmor – utilize a destructive practice to recontextualize source imagery that either represents an existential crisis or has fallen short of expectations. In doing so, they create new works that transform the problematic into the sublime. Through the violent acts of breaking and cutting, they challenge both traditional artistic practices and tropes within the photographic genre while offering viewers a new perspective of hope and healing.
In her series Procession of Ghosts, Ella Morton creates ambrotypes of images of ice and glaciers captured in Greenland, Canada, Svalbard, Patagonia, and Antarctica. She then shatters them and repairs them using the Japanese art of Kintsugi. In this practice – usually applied to ceramics – the resulting, reconstituted piece is considered more beautiful than it was in its original, unblemished state. Through the use of this technique, Morton is calling attention to the pivotal moment in which humanity finds itself; collectively deciding the future of these fragile polar landscapes. In conveying the transcendency of these natural places within a context of salvation, she seeks to offer viewers a sense of hope and optimism.
Dafna Talmor’s series Constructed Landscapes explores shifting conceptions of landscape and perspective, as well as mechanisms of image construction and production. Driven by an interest in fragmentation, abstraction, hybridity, and reconfiguration, Talmor creates “master” negatives comprised of fragments of numerous source negatives through a series of preparatory studies that she obsessively logs by hand. Also included in the exhibition is a selection from her series Constructed Landscapes: Addendum, which repurposes and reimagines redundant source materials in a way that oscillates between the positive and negative and blurs the boundaries of traditional photographic practices.
