Interview with First Look 2025 artist DIANA CHEREN NYGREN: MOTHER EARTH

We took a moment to dive into the artistic processes behind the artists in First Look 2025 to learn about their process, projects, and what inspires them to create work.

What drew you to southwestern landscapes as a focus for this series?

It was really the landscapes themselves that dictated the series. Never having spent much time in the southwest, driving through the region, staying in the desert, taking in the vastness of thelandscape, made a profound impression on me. As I tried to define that impression and the thoughts it raised, the basic idea for this project emerged.

Did you face any challenges creating this work? & How did the choice of mounting the acrylic on the panel come to you?

I would say I had a clear idea of what I wanted to communicate fairly early on in developing the project, but finding the physical form to communicate that effectively was a challenge. Initially I was compositing the people going about their daily activities into surreal desert landscapes. From there I tried inserting the scenes of human habitation into desert landscapes, outlining them, almost as if they were map details once you zoomed into what was happening in the desert. After a lot of feedback and discussion, it became clear that I did not want to imply that people were living their lives as usual on a future parched planet, but that how we would live successfully in that environment remained unknown - that was the challenge the work was presenting to the viewer. How are we going to adapt and change the way we live from what we are accustomed to to work in this future setting? I spent a lot of time thinking about the materials I was using in the project, knowing that the work was driven by an awareness of environmental concerns but printing photographs is not particularly an environmentally friendly process. Ultimately, the acrylic "encasing" and mounting of the current scenes worked both visually as a way of enabling them to be simultaneously distinct from and continuous with the larger landscapes, as well as metaphorically pointing to the problematic nature of plastic and standing for the bubble in which we tend to live.

How did your background as a "city girl and skeptic" shape your perspective on nature and its representation in your photography?

As a child I distinctly remember my parents asking us to admire the beauty of nature. This annoyed me to no end. I couldn't conceive of anything more boring. So I was shocked to realize decades later how much I was drawn to nature, how long I could spend simply looking at clouds, and how much taking in the sky or the ocean seemed to enable me to breathe in a way that I didn't on a daily basis. Photography became a vehicle through which to slow down and take it in, to share my awe for nature, precisely what my parents had tried to do with so little success when I was young. And the fact is that I love city life and will always choose city living, and at the same time it makes me urgently aware of the value of nature and undisturbed natural places. Modern life, it seems to me, is about being able to hold these two ideas at the same time, and hopefully that's what much of my work as a photographer talks about.