Ryan Parra has dedicated much of his photographic career to the artistic documentation of native plants and their many uses. Through grants, fellowships, and residencies, Ryan has explored the landscape, documenting edible, medicinal, and psychoactive plants growing throughout the Southwest. Overlapping science, research, and nature, his works feature objects that may seem familiar in a lab. Ryan creates contrast in landscapes, sometimes inserting himself in a white coat or dropping a stark, clean background behind a plant. He builds compositions that tell layered stories about how humans can look to the desert's resourceful and resilient plants for food, shelter, and other life-giving purposes, as our ancestors have for thousands of years.