Caltech's 2025 Artist-in-Residence Jessica Segall

In her course "Imaging Ecological Futures: Visual Art and Ecology," Jessica Segall, artist-in-residence with the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture, spent the spring 2025 term asking students to think about old and new ways of representing nature.

Segall, a multimedia artist who has held numerous residencies in the United States and abroad, focuses her work on "hostile and threatened landscapes," according to her website. She has had solo exhibitions in Miami, New York, Richmond, Philadelphia, and Cleveland, as well as in Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, and France. She has also participated in group exhibitions in Thailand, Uruguay, Ecuador, Korea, Taiwan, China, Sweden, Indonesia, Mongolia, and Cuba. Upcoming exhibitions this year include a solo show at Kunsthalle Seinäjoki in Finland and a new public sculpture for the Re-Nature Festival in Amsterdam.

In a recent art installation titled Human Energy, Segall displayed sculptural elements inspired by oil pipelines and surrounded these with four screens playing 30-minute video loops. Scenes in the videos were shot at a Chevron oil field in the United States and also in Azerbaijan, where bathing in crude oil is considered a healing modality.

Segall, who has collaborated with scientists in the past, was eager to come to Caltech. "I knew that I wanted to work on something related to climate change, and Caltech's connection to JPL and all the Earth-facing science being done there seemed like a great opportunity. There's so much potential for working with new scientific technologies to expand what we see," Segall says.

Segall has been working with high-speed cameras to document not only crude oil baths but also processes like crushing ice sculptures and swimming with alligators, so she was particularly interested to learn more about the compressed ultrafast photography camera at the Caltech Optical Imaging Laboratory which takes up to 100 billion frames per second. At the Kavli Nanoscience Institute Segall ventured into nano-scale sculpture, using a laser writing technique called 2-photon lithography to create sculptures the height of a human hair.

The "Imaging Ecological Futures" course required students to first learn how nature has been represented in the past. "Most historical imagery is human-centered. There was no landscape painting in Europe until after the Renaissance," Segall explains. "You didn't get nature as a subject in itself. You'd get volumes of medicinal plants, but no depiction of nature without mythological, religious, or moral themes. We looked at art history from the earliest depictions of the hunt, 20th-century nature photography, and contemporary ecofeminist art and asked questions like 'Were these depictions intended to show nature as sublime, as romantic? Did they depict ideas of the ownership or cultivation of nature?' Then we asked, 'How do we depict nature with new knowledge that we can't endlessly extract resources from the planet?'"

Students were also asked to depict elements of nature themselves through drawing and photography. "We took California smog as a subject matter, and asked how we might draw air," Segall says. Using still images and spoken narration, students created a photo-roman, a video telling stories about how they have experienced nature themselves. "The students were great," she says. "They were very engaged and brought different things to the table than the art majors I ordinarily teach."