A photographic meditation on urban peripheries by lens-based artist and educator Morgan Mueller. Mueller’s work explores the relationships between humans, non-humans, and the landscapes that industry and infrastructure leave behind. Drawn to peripheral or altered sites—places that exist at the edge of cities—Mueller looks at how material traces reveal broader stories of transformation, resilience, and entanglement. His goal is not to create definitive accounts but to reframe how these spaces are seen.
Set along the urban waterways around New York City and the New Jersey Meadowlands, “Edgelands” follows the traces of life through each seemingly abandoned locale as the distinctions between natural and constructed, wild and controlled, dissolve. What emerges is a portrait of places in flux: postindustrial wetlands, forgotten shorelines, and infrastructural corridors where decay and renewal coexist. The William Carlos Williams’ quote—”No ideas but in things”—was a guiding idea for the project.
