Calista Lyon

Calista Lyon is an Australian artist and educator based in Columbus, Ohio. She works to subvert dominant narratives of human exceptionalism, competition, and individualism by investigating relationships of interdependence. Through an interdisciplinary research practice she uses images in expanded forms—performance, installation, and social practice—to address ecological collapse. Drawing from diverse epistemologies her research is influenced by vernacular, Indigenous and local forms of knowing and by scientific thinking, including theorists, historians and ethnographers of science. 

In previous works, Lyon has invited a farming community to join together in the act of walking to build a social fabric. She has amplified the voices of Ohio’s threatened species, sharing the sound portrait of the Silver-Haired Bat and the Massasauga Rattlesnake among others. She has documented and shared the individual wave of the people of Green River, Utah. In collaboration with choreographer and artist Ann Carlson, she photographed the gestures of one-hundred employees at UCLA—from facilities management staff to gymnasts, a vice chancellor to an astronomer. She photographed the residents of her farming community and used their portraits as invitations to share a conversation. Currently, she is working with local amateur botanists, farmers, and scientists to develop The Unknown and the Unnamed a performance that explores the white colonial legacy of the Crimson Spider Orchid.

Calista was the 2016/17 University Fellow at The Ohio State University. She was the 2019 Frontier Fellow at Epicenter in Green River, Utah. In 2020 she will be an Artist in Residence at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and in 2021 she will be a Fellow at the Center for Contemporary Art in Kitakyushu, Japan. Born in Nagambie, Australia, Calista received a Diploma of Art in Applied Photography from Melbourne Polytechnic. Relocating to the United States, she received a BFA in Studio Art from California State University, Los Angeles and an MFA in Photography from The Ohio State University.

Video edited by: Dean Taylor