Shawn Bush
2025 Aurora + Herron Residency
August 11-22, 2025



 
 

2025 Aurora + Herron Resident Shawn Bush plans to produce a set of twelve exhibition prints from his series Land, Sea & Air during his two weeks in the Herron darkrooms. In this series, Bush uses reframing and collage techniques to explore how corporations and governments use visual media to shape public opinion and policy regarding critical issues, including climate change, while simultaneously downplaying the dangers and their own role in creating crisis. Bush takes a 1982 climate report to Exxon executives as a starting point, writing,

“In November 1982, after nearly two decades of collaboration with international universities, government-funded scientists, and internal sources, Exxon executives received the results of their research on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. The detailed report explicitly stated that if Exxon and its energy counterparts continued to extract and produce fossil fuels at the same rate, the Earth would continue to warm and reach a point of no return by 2030. Despite this urgent warning, Exxon disregarded its findings, opting to spend over thirty billion US dollars on visual propaganda while funding organizations that promoted climate change denial, including elected governmental officials.”

Bush layers pages from the 1982 report with other source material, including Popular Mechanics, The Encyclopedia of Photography, and The Prop Builders Molding and Casting Handbook, to evoke the multiple systems of power that sideline science, and deflect the devastation of their extractive practices, in favor of profit.

Because these images involve areas of in-camera double exposure, the Zone VI available at Herron will allow the prints to be realized as intended; the artist notes that printing them with a standard enlarger doesn’t achieve, “. .  the smooth, even, and extensive tonal range achievable with a cold cathode enlarger.” The prints made during the Aurora + Herron Residency, which take an average of four hours a piece to make, will be exhibited at the 2025 Charta Festival in Rome.

Shawn Bush is a lens-based artist who grew up in Detroit, Michigan. The city's civic history and geographic location have greatly influenced his understanding of physical space within American sociopolitical and socioeconomic landscapes. Bush’s photographs and collages reflect overdeveloped systems, distorted icons, and collapsing mythologies. He earned an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from Columbia College Chicago. He was a 2025 Light Work Artist in Residence, a 2021 recipient of the Aperture CreatorLabs Photo Fund, a 2022 member of the Silver List, a 2021 Wyoming Arts Council Fellow, and a Kodak Visionary Project Award recipient. Bush won the 2024 Charta Photobook Award and will have a monograph of his project, Angle of Draw, published in conjunction with the award in 2025. His work has appeared in various publications, including Wallpaper Magazine, Wired Magazine, FotoFilmic’s JRNL, and Vogue. He has lectured nationally at several universities and art institutions, including Yale University, the University of Missouri, Filter Photo, and the Los Angeles Center for Photography.

The Aurora + Herron Residency would not be possible without the following partnerships.

Herron School of Art + Design will supply darkroom access, basic chemistry, and onsite support during the residency. Aurora PhotoCenter thanks Herron School of Art + Design for its generous support of this residency.

The resident will stay at Tube Factory Artspace in their artist bed and breakfast located on Cruft Street in the Garfield Park area of Indianapolis. Aurora PhotoCenter thanks Tube Factory Artspace for its generous support of this residency.