Magali Reus

Magali Reus s new photographic series, Knaves , documents an array of mushrooms in headshot-like close up. As though in an al fresco portrait studio, the fungi are posed against backdrops of colourful vintage t-shirts synthetic intrusions into the natural landscape. This beautifully designed artist book sets images from the series within the sepia-tinted pages of a 1990s telephone directory for Park Cities an area of Dallas whose name acts as shorthand for the way in which urban design domesticates nature for ease of human use. Novelist Kathryn Scanlan s text zooms in on a series of fleeting quotidian dramas, mobilizing a cast of evocatively named characters that, like Reus s fungal protagonists, bloom and then disappear.