Morgan Mueller & Aurélien Bayo

Ecotones brings together two bodies of work by Aurélien Bayo and Morgan Mueller, developed over the past several years along the peripheries of New York City, where urban infrastructure, residential life, and fragile ecosystems meet. Bayo's work centers on the wetlands and residential enclaves surrounding JFK Airport, while Mueller follows industrial waterways and restored marshlands across the city and its margins. The term "ecotone" describes a transitional zone between two environments—spaces defined not by stability, but by overlap, tension, and constant negotiation. Conditions that shape both bodies of work and the landscapes they observe.

Just beyond the A train stop for JFK Airport, a narrow, improvised path leads from elevated tracks into a tidal wetland. Moving slowly through this space, the act of noticing becomes a way of entering it. Houses on stilts face the water, small boats drift alongside ducks and herons, and residents tend to daily rhythms that unfold with the tide. The landscape reveals itself incrementally, alive with subtle shifts, layered histories, and quiet instabilities. Bayo's images, spanning portraiture and landscape, inhabit a space between documentation and invention. They render both people and place with care and dignity, while allowing an atmosphere of vulnerability, tension, and latent volatility to surface.

In parallel, Mueller's body of work traces similar conditions across sites such as Newtown Creek and the New Jersey Meadowlands. Here too, slowed attention guides the work, attuning to environments that resist quick reading. These landscapes unfold as dense, active systems where histories of pollution, restoration, and daily life intersect in uneven and often unpredictable ways. Each location holds overlapping temporalities: industrial residue, ecological adaptation, and human presence coexist in dynamic tension. Rather than framing these areas as abandoned or static, the photographs linger with their complexity, tracing how life persists and reorganizes within conditions of ongoing transformation.

Together, the works in Ecotones reflect on how cities metabolize environmental and social change, and how life persists within spaces often overlooked or misunderstood. Moving between observation and interpretation, the exhibition considers the thresholds we inhabit, where boundaries blur and instability becomes a condition of both risk and possibility.

Morgan Mueller is an artist based in Queens, New York and originally from Reno, Nevada, his practice explores relationships between landscape, ecology, and human intervention, focusing particularly on sites shaped by infrastructure and extraction. His work has been shown at the New Museum and Culturehub in New York and his writing has been featured in Pioneer Works Broadcast and Urbanomnibus.

Aurélien Bayo is a photographer from Besançon, France. His work investigates connection and mortality through the relationships between people, nature, dreams, and faith. He is currently based in Brooklyn, New York, where he lives and works.