Sayler/Morris and Christina Seely: museum

Sayler/Morris and Christina Seely: museum August 24 – December 11, 2026 Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery Opening Reception: Thursday, September 24, 5-7 PM

Light Work is pleased to present museum, a collaborative photographic exhibition by the artists Sayler/Morris (Susannah Sayler and Ed Morris) and Christina Seely.

The images in this installation were made in 2014 during the artists’ time as Smithsonian Artist Research Fellows, when they photographed the disassembly of the iconic National Fossil Hall at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. More than a decade later, during a 2025 studio visit, the artists rediscovered the photographs and saw them in a new light. Time had changed the images; it had amplified their disorienting, dreamlike qualities. What is presented inside this exhibition at Light Work is the breaking down of a museum exhibit. The idea of a museum, its authority, certainty, and clarity, is replaced with the rediscovery of the original meaning of museum—a site for muses, a site where knowledge is not fixed but in perpetual development.

This exhibition arrives at a time when museums themselves have become contested spaces and facts themselves have become endangered. Sayler/Morris and Seely’s museum installation asks: How do we consider the use of museum spaces to respect evidence while at the same time recognizing knowledge as ever-evolving, contingent, and partial? And what is the power and role of the museum of the future?

Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris (Sayler/Morris) are interdisciplinary artists whose work considers the intersection of human histories and ecology. They have been awarded numerous fellowships, including the Guggenheim Fellowship (2023), and have exhibited widely, including an upcoming permanent installation at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Sayler is full professor in the Department of Film and Media Arts at Syracuse University. Sayler/Morris live and work in Hudson, NY. sayler-morris.com

Christina Seely’s multifaceted photographic work maps our increasingly tenuous relationship to the nonhuman living world. Her work is held in many collections and has been exhibited widely, including at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska, KunstHausWein in Austria, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. She was a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2024–25 US/UK Fulbright Scholar. She works between the US and Scotland. christinaseely.com

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