The Hesperides Project

Our cultural system for creating symbols has been fractured by systems designed to monetize attention. Hesperides is our effort to cultivate the conditions under which meaning can emerge within that fracture through love, relation, myth, performance, and ritual.

Symbols are not discovered or consumed – they are created through shared human experience. Through staged photography, storytelling, and performance, we demonstrate the creation of a shared mythological world and allow its symbols to develop through our relationship and collective imagination.

Hesperides is an ongoing multimedia project that extends beyond photography. The photographs establish its characters and archetypes; objects, writing, fashion, performance, and ritual give it physical presence beyond the image.

The current cycle, now in development, will culminate in a public presentation featuring:

• An exhibition of nine mythologically staged photographs

• A monograph disguised as a fashion magazine

• A full-scale tree sculpture

• A fashion show

• A dance performance

Together, these elements form a single work: an attempt to make mythology – not by recovering an ancient symbolic system, but by creating one through contemporary human relationships.

The Golden Apple Office of Propaganda (GAOP) is a fictitious bureaucratic agency that serves as the media wing of The Garden of The Hesperides (a.k.a. The Garden). The GAOP exists both separately from and within The Garden itself. Its mission is not to spread disinformation, but to promote the worldview and activities of The Garden, including love, collaboration, mutual discovery, imagination, and the cultivation of human meaning. The GAOP publishes reports, dispatches, field notes, and occasional manifestos concerning art, mythology, culture, and the ongoing practice of meaning-making in the age of optimization.

The GAOP is represented by the Recursive Apple logo. The design represents the cyclical and chaotic nature of how meaning is created, shared, and transformed. Drawing from the tradition of organizations known to use the appearance of authority to subvert authority, the design is a nod to chaos, sacred disorder, and the absurdist tradition of meaning-making through paradox and ambiguity.

Representatives of The GAOP are known as Agents, or Agents of the Garden. Agents are imbued with the authority to contribute to, interpret, or reference The Garden in any way they see fit. Agents carry the Recursive Apple.

These elements provide a protective fog, keeping The Garden safe from the forces of cultural extraction.

– Ladon
Managing Custodian, Garden of the Hesperides

Jeremy Kirsch and Acacia Melody are an uncle-and-niece multidisciplinary creative duo based in Southern California. They began as a musical act, performing classic rocksteady songs in living rooms and pizza joints. They have since expanded their collaboration into visual arts. Their current work, The Hesperides Project, is a series of mythologically staged photographic portraits drawing from Greek and Egyptian mythology, Afrofuturism, and early glamour photography.

Jeremy was raised in a house with cameras and a darkroom. His first photographic epiphany came while thumbing through his mom’s Diane Arbus books during an all-night party with friends. He has made a living as a graphic designer, fabricator, luthier, and musician. Based in Fillmore, California, Jeremy has exhibited his work in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Pacific Northwest, and Southern California. His first book, Freekmagnet, was published in 2005 on his own Pentaprism imprint.

Acacia Melody is a Los Angeles–based model, commercial actress, dancer, musician, and multidisciplinary artist who has worked professionally in the creative industries for twenty years. Her first gig at age five required her to keep her loose tooth in place for a photo shoot. She has produced DIY fashion and performance events, directed her own music videos, and performs with her band Moon Kisses.