“Note, for example, how Jessica estranges us from classically beautiful landscapes by offering instead seemingly unearthly colors in the skies, or atmospheres of choking thickness, or smolder and char – that we can smell, that we can feel – as far as the eye can see. The estrangement that Jessica enacts in her pictures is persuasive because it is informed by a unique perspective – it literally springs from her history. We see how an otherwise “topical” examination of fires and climate crisis becomes uncanny in the hands of the photographer who allows (invites) pre-reflective personal perception to inform her picture-making. Uncanny because entirely individual to the maker, and yet formally palpable to the viewer.

After grasping the initial call to arms conveyed in these photographs, we come to recognize that they are simply too beautiful – too wholly thoughtful – to express grief alone (although it is certainly there). In The Sun Sets Midafternoon, Jessica Hays shows us that real love and reverence for the land is the foundation of hope and of any real possibility of change.” 

— Tim Carpenter, photographer