Wondrous Sightings - Silas Edwards

Silas Edwards presents Wondrous Sightings, featuring the artists Weronika Gęsicka, Edith Morris and Henry Turner.

Legendary creatures such as the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot have long challenged photography’s ability to prove reality. In the age of AI-generated images, this challenge resurfaces in new forms: non-existent animals are circulating on social media and even finding their way into scientific databases. As well as casting doubt on the credibility of visual representation, these images also reveal our projections, fears and desires when faced with nature. Against a backdrop of collapsing biodiversity, cryptids (animals whose supposed existence is not supported by any scientific evidence) thus become a mirror of an increasingly troubled relationship between our imagination of living things and living things themselves. The exhibition Wondrous Sightings explores this uncertain boundary between evidence and imagination through the works of Weronika Gęsicka on invented encyclopaedias, Edith Morris on enchantment through photographic hoaxes, and Henry Turner on the mythical evolution of an iconic New Zealand cryptid image.