Magali Reus

Magali Reus's new photographic series, 'Knaves', documents an array of mushrooms in headshot-like close up. As though in an al fresco portrait studio, the fungi are posed against backdrops of colourful vintage t-shirts - synthetic intrusions into the natural landscape. This beautifully designed artist book sets images from the series within the sepia-tinted pages of a 1990s telephone directory for Park Cities - an area of Dallas whose name acts as shorthand for the way in which urban design domesticates nature for ease of human use. Novelist Kathryn Scanlan's text zooms in on a series of fleeting quotidian dramas, mobilizing a cast of evocatively named characters that, like Reus's fungal protagonists, bloom and then disappear.