Nº 9958 Canto XIII, 42 x 33.5", 2026

Canto XIII is set in Dante’s “Wood of the Suicides,” where those who rejected their bodies are transformed into gnarled, suffering trees as punishment. Canto XIII is the only place in Dante’s Inferno with vegetation, yet it is a perverted nature in which the human and non-human world are not merely entangled but inseparable. In this nearly monochrome suite of photographs, the absence of green is total—a condition that echoes the phrase “no green leaves,” a recurring image in Dante’s Canto XIII, where life is stripped away and regeneration is denied.

Across the project, the vegetal world appears arrested between life and afterlife. Plant forms persist but do not flourish; they endure without growth. Density becomes confinement, and entanglement replaces abundance. The scenes are illuminated by theatrical light that cuts through mist or vapor, producing shafts, flares, and sudden blooms of radiance. Light behaves unpredictably—descending from above, entering from the sides, or seeming to rise from the ground. While the setting draws from Dante’s Canto XIII, the work is informed by contemporary conditions of political and environmental crisis, where the consequences of life squandered reverberate beyond the allegorical and into the present.

However static an eternity for the damned souls, Dante and Virgil travel through and make their way out—and Dante continues through Purgatorio and even to Paradise, where he encounters the divine. Perhaps Dante’s movement is analogous to the or viewer entering these images—trying to navigate a dense, disorienting space, but, unlike the damned, perhaps finding a passage through.