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BRANDON S GELLIS
EDUCATOR / NEW MEDIA ARTIST / MAKER
SALINE DREAMS, 2022
Saline Dreams is a collaborative-responsive project by Brandon Gellis and Negin Ehtesabian that explores the depletion of marine, estuary, and freshwater habitats across the U.S. and Iran. Through digital collage, the series links distant geographies through a shared concern for ecological fragility, industrial intervention, and the political conditions that allow vulnerable species and habitats to disappear.
The work is simultaneously critical of both governments’ treatment of ecological protection and species preservation, pointing to how weak regulation, environmental mismanagement, and systems of power contribute to long-term damage. Rather than treating environmental collapse as isolated or purely natural, the project frames it as a consequence of policy, infrastructure, and human dependency on technological control. In this sense, the images become visual arguments about responsibility as much as they are meditations on loss.
At the same time, Saline Dreams uses collaboration itself as a method of ecological thinking. Built across distance, the project mirrors the interdependence of the systems it depicts, where water, land, species, and human action are all connected by invisible but consequential networks. The result is a body of work that holds grief, critique, and imagination together, suggesting that ecological futures must be understood through both local action and transnational awareness.