To Redecorate a Dream, III. Archival inkjet print, 20.6 x 26.3 in. Edition of 10 + 2AP. 2025. © JW Toftness.

To Redecorate a Dream… JW Toftness’s work lives in a highly technological space where the natural world resists and resurfaces.

To Redecorate a Dream struck me as a reminder that, despite the now widely held belief that anything digital lives in a separate, ethereal world, the effects of this technology push themselves back into our reality.

The AI data center saga shows that none of what we think has been “dematerialized” is truly dematerialized. Server farms need water, space, power, concrete, infrastructure, etc… These are colossal rematerializations, or perhaps, hypermaterializations.

To Redecorate a Dream reckons with our agency and hubris, placing photography (as an act, tool, and result) at the center of the conversation, all the while gesturing at its ambiguous role. It’s a mode of capture to understand where we are and it is, simultaneously, accelerating the erosion of the natural world.

What follows is a conversation recorded on Zoom in September 2026.

JW Toftness’s work is currently on view at Candela Photographic Arts (Richmond, VA) until October 24, 2026. More info on Candela’s website here.

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To Redecorate a Dream, XI (Baudrillard’s Blues), archival inkjet print, 22.8 x 26.8 in., Edition of 10 + 2AP, 2024 © JW Toftness

Yogan Muller: Looking at To Redecorate a Dream as a whole, my mind is going in many different directions: the commodification of natural objects, a commentary on our human-made ecologies, how things perform (or rather how we make them perform in a photographic setting), the heavily mediated experience of life today, the Anthropocene, etc. At the same time, the series has a deeply touching, do-it-yourself tone, as though you were attempting to repair, heal, and remediate. I wonder what was the impetus of To Redecorate a Dream?

James W Toftness: You definitely touch on what’s at the core with the heavily mediated experience of life today and the Anthropocene.

I wanted to make work about how technology (and the visual saturation it radiates) changes our lives in both very grand ways and very simple ways. I’m sure you’re familiar with the extraordinary amounts of lithium and rare earth elements needed to power all of our devices, and I use such devices all the time.

That’s large scale, but we feel it in our bodies too: I wake up around 2 or 3 AM almost every single morning with really significant back pain from working a desk job for many years using computers. I wonder how much of the population will end up with kyphosis, that tilt in our neck from slumping over staring at our phones. In some ways, that’s the least of it, but the premise starts with these physical impacts, suggesting other deformities as well.

What I call the mutational capacities of technology is what pushed this series forward.

To Redecorate a Dream, II (Prisoners of a Strange Image). Archival inkjet, 60.7 x 27.5 in., edition of 5 + 2AP, 2025. © JW Toftness.

YM: The series is shot in the intimate setting of a studio with strobes, strong color casts, photo backdrops, and sculptures you made. I wonder what dream you are aiming to redecorate?

JWT: This question makes me think a lot more about the title and what it was doing, semantically.

The sculptures have always been an important part of this series. They are made out of papier-mâché, so they’re really basic and pulpy, and that fact, their materiality and the physical act of making and building, connects process with concept at the core of the work. Molding this distinctly gunky material contrasts quite starkly with my use of advanced digital camera equipment and post-production technologies.

Working with these basic physical components in the midst of the digital feels necessary to the dream I’m redecorating. You could interpret that in a positive way of repair or remediation as you say in the first question. Is there a positive end to the trajectory of technological innovation? Is there even a dream? Whose dream? Can we redecorate what has been imagined for us by the techno elite?

The other, and maybe more cynical side is the redecoration project that never ends. That can be our remaking of reality as humans, stemming from our impulse to continually change and shape our physical, mental, and digital realities.

The dream I gesture at can also be the separated world we’re attempting to build with AI. We seem to have embraced the idea that AI is way out there, existing as a digital, almost ethereal, entity–an entity that we discover we do not really understand despite creating it. But the purportedly separate world of AI smashes up against the very physical issues that come with building data centers, such as the destruction of arable land and the need to secure water rights for cooling server farms.

For me, redecorating our overall dream is akin to pasting up wallpaper as we go, and constantly repainting over the things that are eroding.

I’ve made an unnecessarily dense network of series and sub-series, so I consider To Redecorate a Dream to be under the umbrella of a larger project. And now I have a second and even a third iteration in that series called When Seeds Are Sent For Flowers. But, sorry, I digress.

To Redecorate a Dream, XIV (Simulacra and Sytemization), archival inkjet print, 25.2 x 31 in., edition of 10 + 2AP, 2025 © JW Toftness

YM: You have a background in the humanities. I wonder how thinkers have shaped your relationship to the world, photography and your subjects.

JWT: Yes, I got degrees in Literature and Philosophy and then a Master’s in the humanities, which was an open option degree where I took critical theory, literature, and some classes on aesthetics. It was a bit all over the place, but it did have a deep influence on all the things I bring to To Redecorate a Dream and to the series beyond it.

I worked as an academic editor for many years, so I’ve worked with language itself, but then ideas from critical theorists such as Baudrillard, or artists like Hito Steyerl, who have written a lot about perception, virtualization, are really important to the work I do.

Among contemporary thinkers, Timothy Morton and his theory of hyperobjects is more relevant to me and my work. Morton’s words are present whenever I think about technology and networks, how they influence us, and how we operate in the world.

I also love literature in general, and have from a young age. My developing series When Seeds Are Sent For Flowers draws from the myth of Persephone and Hades and how it’s been adapted over time. I use the myth to evince the problematic dependency generated by technological saturation. Like Hades offering the temptation of a few pomegranate seeds, trapping Persephone in an endless cycle of Winter/Spring, Life/Death, many new technologies promise us personal nourishment while the driving motivations behind their uptick are controlled by the levers of power and capital.

Pulling from this literary sensibility, I sometimes find myself much more influenced by fiction than I necessarily do by the philosophers I read. In part because fiction has the ability to say what philosophy already does, sometimes much better, and sometimes it can say what philosophy can’t. I turn to a lot of that reading when imagining projects and coming up with new ideas.

YM: In the age of infinite scroll and Gen AI, we’re living in a permanent visual spectacle that propagates a sense of boundless possibilities. At the same time, the digital sphere is directly hit by the ecological crisis, a chilling reminder that bounds and limits exist. It is particularly true this summer with extreme weather wildfires. To Redecorate a Dream carries this sense of urgency, but it doesn’t rule out the very tools we need and use to measure and feel our ecological peril. Photography included. I think the series truly lives in this liminal space. Your thoughts on that?

JWT: A lot of what you’ve said is right there at the heart of what I do and follows me throughout the series.

Stepping back to the impetus of To Redecorate a Dream, another part of the series’ thrust is the separation between the physical and the digital. It’s a psychological divide more than anything, but we almost treat it as an ontological one, as though the digital is a separate realm with its own separate existence. But as you point out, the effects the digital produces push themselves back into our physical reality. They were never truly divorced from it.

Bounds and limits, yes, they exist, and that’s there in the series. I use papier-maché, dirt and weeds I pull from my yard, reincorporating a physical, living, dying matter within my installations and digital images.

You mentioned the tools we need to use to measure our ecological peril, photography included. I just wanted to touch on that point as I am often asked why photography. I think we will never fully get rid of the connection between truth and photography, even though there’s a large corpus of critical theory that tries to chip away at it. And because of that irreducible connection, photography seems particularly potent to engage with showing unfolding ecological issues.

Ultimately, and strangely, photography’s connection to truth gives it a robust connection to illusion.

Using photography becomes an act of creating complex spaces and asking viewers to navigate them within the artwork. The photograph also functions as a mirror, simultaneously mapping how we navigate our disjointed reality, as it is.

Other art forms can do this in their own way, but photography, again, is uniquely equipped to engage with truth and illusion. Take my image of a grotesque hand floating in space with a flower levitating above it, for example (“Blissmaxxing”). If you paint that, it’s all what you put in. But with photography, the resulting image will always carry connotations of “that thing was hanging somewhere in real space.” Whether or not it is true is not the debate, but the sense that it was hanging somewhere in reality is important for discussions of navigating our current moment.

To Redecorate a Dream, I (Make Graven unto Thee), archival inkjet print, 27.6 x 37.7 in., edition of 10 + 2AP, 2024 © JW Toftness

YM: Tell us how you envision bringing the series to fruition.

JWT: As the series went on, it expanded to include installation pieces and time-based media, as well as two large-scale works printed on transparency film. The installations and those large transparencies brought more life to the images. Literally, they hang and float in the gallery space, so they have this more material presence.

Those developments were important in contrasting my images against larger image ecologies.

The series is now wrapped up. There’s 15 core images, and there’s a standalone sculpture.

YM: What does photographing in the warming world mean to you?

JWT: I think this might be the most difficult question that you posed.

I think it’s a tension between our individual responsibility versus corporate or governmental responsibilities that aren’t being met.

While I deeply hope images can claim some sort of instructional or inspirational valence, it remains “photographing”… Meaning, we talk about ecological peril, while using a camera that has all of those mined materials in it. The same goes for digital post-production. So that weight of personal responsibility is always eating away at the corner.

At the same time, I know the facts and figures. For example, I know that if I stopped using my camera or my computer, the dent I would make environmentally would be so minimal that big corporations would just laugh it off.

It’s still a hard question to answer, and I hope that artistic production can bring and do some good in the world.

JW Toftness: When Seeds Are Sent for Flowers, installation views, Candela Photographic Arts, Richmond, VA, Friday, September 4 – Saturday, October 24, 2026. Image courtesy of Candela Photographic Arts.

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JW Toftness is an MFA student at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). His work focuses on human relationships with technology and on slippages between perceived and mediated realities. Toftness’s multimedia works include photography, video, sculpture, and installation. Based in Savannah, GA, he is a featured artist in New South, Volume 2: Double Vision (Atlanta Center for Photography, 2025) and has been selected to attend Review Santa Fe in October 2026. Toftness was the lead artist for SCAD’s deFINE 2026 Painting & Photography Showcase and a Spotlight artist for their 2025 Fine Art Showcase. His work was exhibited in UnBound14! at Candela Books + Gallery in Richmond, VA, and in other group shows at: Office Space Gallery, Detroit, MI (as part of the NOVA24 Photo + Film Festival); XoXo Gallery, Baltimore, MD; Ingram Library Gallery, University of West Georgia, Carrollton, GA; Artstryngs, Savannah, GA; Atlanta Photography Group, Atlanta, GA; Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, Providence, RI; Oregon Contemporary, Portland, OR; and ATHICA, Athens, GA. His work has also appeared in multiple online exhibitions hosted by Through the Lens Collective (South Africa), Lenscratch, and Blue Sky Gallery (Portland, OR). Cleo the Project Space (Savannah, GA) hosted Toftness’s solo exhibition, Coda, in December 2025; his MFA Thesis exhibition, Eidolon, was presented at SCAD’s Alexander Hall in April 2026; and he will have a solo show at Candela Photo Arts in the Fall of 2026. Toftness’s work is held in multiple private collections.

Artist website: jwtoftness.com

Instagram: @jwtoftness

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Yogan Muller is a French photographer, first-generation graduate, researcher, and educator. His work engages with ecological overshoot and its impact on landscapes, resources, and communities. Research, critical approaches to landscape, fieldwork, and design are central to his process. He works with photography, photogrammetry, drones, and the book form.

After the traumatic loss of his father in February 2022, belonging, identity, and fractured roots are themes that came to the fore. He sublimates his loss in JPM, an ongoing, manifold project which culminated in a book dummy he conceived, designed, and produced within Penumbra Foundation’s Long-Term Program (Photobooks) in 2024 and 2025. His JPM dummy has been shortlisted and exhibited at the LUMA Foundation during the 2025 Rencontres d’Arles, the 2026 Dummy Award (Photobook Museum, Cologne, Germany), and the 2026 Athens Photo Festival in Greece.

In October 2019, Yogan moved to Los Angeles to join the UCLA Design Media Arts (DMA) Counterforce Lab. He taught photography, photogrammetry, AI, and drones at UCLA DMA between 2020 and 2024. In November 2018, he graduated with one of the first practice-based PhDs in Photography from ENSAV La Cambre and Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.

His work is in the collections of Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris), the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), and private collections.

Artist website: www.yogan-muller.com

Instagram: @yoganmuller