UPCOMING EXHIBITION

Phantom Sun

Ohan Breiding

BAXTER ST at the Camera Club of New York is pleased to present Phantom Sun, an exhibition of works by Swiss-American artist and filmmaker Ohan Breiding, curated by Mathilde Walker-Bilaud, BAXTER ST’s 2025 – 2026 Guest Curatorial recipient. On view from November 20, 2025 – January 28, 2026, the lens-based presentation amplifies landscapes as witnesses to ecological, political, and cultural issues, foregrounding what has been erased or cast aside.

Throughout their work, Breiding employs photography, video, as well as photographic and filmic archives to examine ecological care, identity, and collective memory through a trans-feminist lens. In Phantom Sun, Breiding pulls from the “Killed Negatives” a trove of rejected photographs once belonging to the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the government agency established in 1937 to provide aid to farmers during the Great Depression. These photographic negatives were punctured with circular holes, marking them as unprintable, often for failing to reinforce the public narrative shaped by the FSA and by Roy Striker, Chief of its Historical Section.

In this project, Breiding revives these once-buried photographs to give them new agency. By reengaging these fragmented images of the Great Depression, the artist reframes the FSA’s vision of American farm life against today’s uncertainties. Composed of dozens of discarded archival negatives, the installation overlays past and present histories of ecological precarity and resilience, exploring ways of caring for the land and its memory despite exclusion and violence.

Conceived in dialogue with curator Mathilde Walker-Billaud, Phantom Sun employs the motif of the black hole––floating surreally over the rejected images––to confront the failures of the public archive, while annotating and expanding the genre of social and environmental documentary photography that Roy Striker and his team were instrumental in establishing. 

About Ohan Breiding

Based in New York, Breiding’s work has been exhibited at MASS MoCA, Arts and Letters, Hesse Flatow, Oceanside Museum (Getty PST), FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Kunsthaus Zürich, IKOB Museum of Contemporary Art and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Breiding is a 2025–2026 Sharpe-Walentas Artist in Residence and has previously held residencies at the Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR), Triangle Arts, TBA21–Academy Ocean Space, LMCC on Governors Island, the Millay Colony, and Shandaken: Storm King. They are the recipient of the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, A.I.R. Fellowship, Hellman Award, Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award and a DAAD Award. Breiding is an Assistant Professor in the Art Department at Williams College and is represented by Ochi Gallery, Los Angeles.

About Mathilde Walker-Billaud

Walker-Billaud is a curator, writer, and educator working across media and contexts, with a special interest in time-based art and discursive practices. Dialogic, research-driven, and intersectional in her approach, she is committed to interpreting and presenting art that reflects the cultural, social, and ecological complexities of our time while challenging traditional categorizations and dominant narratives.

Walker-Billaud is currently the Curator of Programs and Engagement at the American Folk Art Museum in New York (Lenapehoking), where she curated Ana Pi’s performance series A Dance for Madalena (2025), co-curated the film series Radical Institutions and Experimental Psychiatry: The Legacy of Francesc Tosquelles on Film (with Sonia Epstein, 2024) and co-edited the proceedings Unexpected Partners: Self-Taught Art and Modernism in Interwar America (2024). 

Walker-Billaud’s independent curatorial projects include the group exhibition Noise of the Flesh. Score for Gina Pane at Frac des Pays de la Loire, France (2023), the interdisciplinary program Jeanne Duval: A Spectre in a French Landscape at the Centre Pompidou (2021); and the film and performance series Flaherty NYC: Surface Knowledge (with Courtney Stephens, 2019). She is the recipient of the 2019 BKH Curator Award for which she presented the group exhibition The World Is Gone, I Must Carry You at Bonniers Kunsthal, Sweden. Her writing and voice have appeared in E-Flux Journal, BOMB Magazine, ART PAPERS, Movement Research Performance Journal and the podcast Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything. She was a guest speaker at UnionDocs, CCS Bard, Colgate University, MoMA Doc Fortnight 2022, Cinema Island Film Festival, and a curator-in-residence at AIR351 in Lisbon, Portugal. She holds a Master of Arts from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.