Hand-colored composite photographs collaged with animal inhabitants, insect forms, gestural architectural renderings, decorated taxidermic specimen and small reliefs that employ feathers, fur and fly-tying techniques comprise Bryan Zimmerman’s narrative landscapes in 17-Year Cicadas. Evocative of cicadas that spend 17 subterrestrial years as nymphs, Zimmerman’s photographic collages evolve over several years and emerge from dark, impoverished America humming stories. 17-Year Cicadas immortalizes the epic tale latent in overlooked gritty rural clumps, “urban pastoral” rambles and remote wilderness areas. His imagery of abandoned places pieces together the remnants of the site’s imposed Hominidae history after people have packed themselves up and moved on. The locations pictured are humanized but also human-less.

The resulting landscape tableaux offer, in the artist’s words, “pictures of wilderness and human desire happening in the same place.”