Night Vision emerges at a moment when the social and ecological frameworks of the world feel increasingly fragile; a sense of imminent collapse stirs an instinctive desire to retreat into the rocky folds of the earth. Set against an ancient volcanic caldera whose sheltering contours and rich basalt columns become both a literal and symbolic space of refuge. Photographing these formations - caves, grottos, and shadowed pools, Night Vision stages a return to the elemental; to a deeper kind of interiority.

Drawing on classical iconographies and religious myth, Night Vision gestures toward meaning making amid chaos. In this sense, the work is both an archive of a disappearing world, and an act of conjuring; rendering visible the subterranean ecologies of somatic experience that arise when the surface world no longer holds.

Jesse Boyd-Reid (b. 1991) is a visual artist living on Bundjalung Country in Northern New South Wales. His practice is rooted in photographic explorations of family, queerness, and the spiritual dimensions of the sublime, often moving between the intimate and the mythic. Working primarily with film and traditional printing processes, Boyd-Reid’s practice draws connections between inner worlds and the physical landscapes that hold them.

Boyd-Reid completed his undergraduate and honours degree in Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2019, and was accepted into the Arctic Trust’s residency program in Svalbard, Norway.

Boyd-Reid was awarded the Cranbourne Fellowship, the Lionel Gell Foundation Scholarship for Artistic Excellence and the Margaret Lawrence social justice award, and has presented work at Blindside Gallery, Lon Gallery, Museum of Art and Culture, Tweed Regional Art Gallery, Airspace Projects, Monash Gallery of Art, Perth Centre for Photography and Photo2021.