Upstart Modern presents Arboreal Alchemies, a contemplative group exhibition featuring the work of Sarah Bird, Terri Loewenthal, and Laura Plageman. Through photography-based practices that challenge the conventions of the scenic image, these three artists reveal the hidden structures, emotional resonances, and ethical stakes embedded within the natural world.
Why do certain landscapes stop us in our tracks? Arboreal Alchemies explores this question by dismantling the familiar language of landscape photography and replacing it with a more intimate, experiential mode of seeing. In an era defined by algorithmic saturation and visual excess, Bird, Loewenthal, and Plageman operate as contemporary “mavens” who have mastered arcane, highly specific processes to bring what is buried, overlooked, or ineffable to the surface.
Sarah Bird approaches the redwood forest as a living community rather than a resource. Her photographs function as portraits: quiet but powerful tipping points for empathy that shift the viewer’s relationship to the forest from extractive to relational. The trees are not backdrops; they are sentient presences that demand recognition.
Terri Loewenthal reveals what she calls the “Psychscapes” of Mount Tamalpais through custom-built optics and in-camera color layering. By rejecting literal representation, she invites viewers to trust instinct and emotional response over documentary clarity. Her images feel truer than realism, collapsing perception, memory, and place into a single visual experience.
Laura Plageman reworks her photographs into layered compositions where fragments remain visible, presenting landscapes as unsettled and continuously remade. These works explore how it feels to encounter landscapes shaped by unseen histories: geological forces, ancient sediments, traces of past inhabitants, and the absence of those who left no mark. They suggest landscapes as unsettled and continuously remade through time, human presence, and the act of photographing itself.
Together, these artists form a visual symphony of connection between viewer and image, body and landscape, observation and participation. Arboreal Alchemies reminds us that we are not passive observers of nature, but participants in its ongoing, evolving story.
The exhibition will be on view at Shop Camino throughout February and March
Visitors are invited to experience a body of work that reframes landscape not as scenery, but as relationship.
Check gallery website for hours and additional info