Upper Atrium
Thaw Line: Lindsey Kennedy and Josh Skinner
June 5, 2025 – August 30, 2025
The photography exhibition Thaw Line centers the natural world—both in its intimate details and expansive landscapes—and humanity’s shifting relationship with it. In Josh Skinner’s black-and-white images, the human presence is always felt, even when physically absent: an empty deer stand, an abandoned construction site, ghostly trailers nestled in the woods. These are quiet traces of how we’ve imprinted ourselves onto the land. And yet, while we may play upon the earth and one day be buried beneath it, the images ask whether we are ever truly of it.
Lindsey Kennedy’s photographs, rendered in a subtly muted yet richly textured palette, capture the elemental power of nature—blazing fire, crystalline waterfalls frozen mid-cascade, the relentless spread of invasive plant life. Her work quietly reflects on the delicate balance between destruction and beauty. It’s unclear whether we’ll be overtaken by nature’s grandeur, absorbed into its quiet splendor, or remain the catalyst of its unraveling.
Josh Skinner is an artist and photographer born in Duluth and raised in Northern Minnesota. He moved to the South over 20 years ago to explore the Southern culture that was largely unfamiliar to him. Much of Josh’s life has been shaped by the forests of Minnesota, a life of play and work, movies, art, and the quiet streets of small-town life. Largely self-taught, Josh honed his photographic craft by observing and learning from the work of others, including his father and wife. He loves a late bloomer and a slow mover. Josh currently lives in Athens, Georgia with his wife Kristen Bach, daughter Maypop Wren, and their Great big pup Pearl.
Lindsey Kennedy is a photographer whose practice considers the human-nature relationship in the Anthropocene and the psychological experience of climate doom. She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Wisconsin and earned her MFA in studio art at the University of Georgia in 2024. Her photographs have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and Rolling Stone. She is the recipient of the 2020 Innovate Grant, the 2022 Willson Center Graduate Research Award, and was a finalist in the 2024 Film Photo Award.
