Jacob Church and Aghigh Afhkami present Mundane Fires, a dialogue between two ongoing photography projects, Afhkami’s Ecdysis and Church’s Strange Fires. Ecdysis, the act of shedding becomes a metaphor for a psychological rupture: a slow, painful transformation in which the self is no longer recognizable, and surroundings and memories merge. Strange Fires seeks to pose questions about the complicated relationship between community and individuals and how our built environment serves as a sort of language, communicating at once a community’s values, desires, and disenfranchisement. Together the works exchange reflections of place, identity, transformation, and memory.

Aghigh Afkhami (b. 1996, Tehran; based in Boston) is a multidisciplinary artist working with photography, video, and bookmaking. Her practice explores memory, resilience, and fragmentation through narrative and sequencing. She holds an MFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Afkhami’s photobooks Salakhi (2024, with Amir Esfandiari) and Stress (2024) have been presented at international art book fairs including Miss Read (Berlin) and the LA Art Book Fair (Los Angeles). Her work has been exhibited in Iran, the United States, and the UAE, and she was a finalist in the 19th Arte Laguna Prize (Venice).

Jacob Church is a photographer born in Bowling Green, Ohio. Church’s images are exposed and kept in the dark for sometime, creating space between the fiction of the occurrence as it lives in his memory and the fact of the latent image. His work has been exhibited at Panopticon gallery in Boston, MA and at La Grange in Vers Pont du Gard, France. His photographs have been featured in Pearl Press, Oranbeg Press, Lenscratch, and Fotofilmic.

Ecdysis is the act of shedding. It is a moment of growing pain marked by suffering and extreme vulnerability while resisting becomes bold unconsciously. In this project, ecdysis becomes a metaphor for a psychological rupture: a slow, painful transformation in which the self is no longer recognizable to itself, and surroundings and memories merge, dissolving into nothingness.

The work emerges from a prolonged state of absence, distance, and loss. It traces the moment when the human mind begins to slip—when the thin boundary between existing and not existing collapses. Time stretches, attachment erodes, and consciousness fragments. What remains is not clarity, but endurance: continued existence paired with an escalating sense of madness.

As the project unfolds, the images degrade. They become increasingly grainy, unstable, and barely photographic, yet existing as photographs. This visual erosion mirrors the internal collapse of perception, where reality becomes paralyzed and truth merges with illusions and paranoia. Rage, confusion, and attachment seep into the surface of the image.

The artist’s vision in this project is about the act of staying alive while shedding a former self—exposed, unprotected, and unsure whether what remains can still be called identity or reality.

Strange Fires

In my photographs of American towns, I seek to pose questions about the complicated relationship between community and individuals. I look at how our built environment serves as a sort of language, communicating at once a community’s values, desires, and disenfranchisement. Defined in part by my identity as a working class American, I use the camera as a tool to evaluate my relationship to American histories and beliefs.

My ongoing project Strange Fires integrates observation and memoir. Photographing in New England, I trace recollections of my childhood against the contemporary condition of a region widely associated with early American history. I see the state of things on the surfaces of buildings, painted on cars, and in the faces of strangers on the street. If there is a through line or a certain kind of beauty, it’s one of love tethered to discontent, tenderness in rough places, and unconscious longing.