Framing Nature at the MFA, Boston

Untitled (Our Family's Garden), from the series Elegant Alien, 2023

Photograph, inkjet print

Excellent show, recommend if you're in Boston. "Worcester-based photographer Claudio Eshun often stages carefully composed scenes that feature friends and family in familiar settings, as here, working in the garden of their home. Seemingly frozen in time and space, the artist and his siblings surround the seated figure of their mother, who presides over their activities like royalty and seems to anchor them all to the leafy green landscape of their backyard garden.

"Eshun's work revolves around his sense of himself as a formerly stateless person, having been born in Ghana, grown up in Italy, and moved to Massachusetts as an adult. This image of a family rooted in place is a kind of counterbalance to what the artist describes as his lingering feelings of "alienation, adaptation, and assimilation.""