STATEMENT
Our cultural system for creating symbols has been deliberately fractured 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 how new myths are built through relationships and collective imagination.
BIO
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. The Hesperides Project will culminate in a public event featuring an exhibition of the work, a full-scale tree sculpture, a fashion show, and a dance performance.
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 Moonkisses.
01: THE STAR
My niece, Acacia, and I are collaborating on an epic art project inspired by the theme of The Hesperides. Our first piece, The Star, explores themes of hope, creativity, inspiration, and renewal. It portrays a young peasant girl in a wistful moment, pausing from her chores to daydream of a more fulfilling life elsewhere. Though she is youthful, her dreams — like the ancient cántaro she rests upon — carry the timeless human longing for change and the hope of something better.
Visually, this piece takes the form of a classic glamour portrait, lit in the style of 1930s studio photography – an aesthetic that feels perfectly suited to a piece called The Star. For me, the image also carries a personal sense of renewal: I hadn’t photographed a portrait in over a decade, and Acacia’s encouragement (or perhaps her insistence! 😄) gave me the reason I needed to pick up the camera and start making images again.
02: THE MOON
As part of our Hesperides Project, The Moon approaches these ancient stories not as fixed or literal interpretations, but as an ever-shifting constellation of ideas: hope, guardianship, longing, and the costs of desire.
Crowned in lunar radiance, the figure stands grounded in a space shaped for performance. She is both guardian and performer, bridging the sacred and the theatrical, aligning heaven with earth. The image draws upon diverse artistic lineages, bringing together sacred iconography, the elegance of early fashion photography, and theatricality of performance art. In weaving these together, we seek to show beauty not as an ornament, but a deliberate and meditative act.
We all know the feeling of reaching for what lies just beyond our grasp. It is human nature to keep striving for hope, even in times of uncertainty. Perhaps these images of hope and beauty are not answers, but small acts of defiance against despair. And even the smallest gestures can remind us that it is up to each of us – together – to bring light into darkness.
03: THE ARTIST
Chaos is the primal generative force of the universe. Chaos is the beginning of everything.
In The Artist, she is both instigator and translator. As a disruptor, she exposes cracks in the current order to make room for the new. Her work dismantles familiar narratives of sound, language, or image, reminding us that any existing structure is a small island in a vast ocean of constant change. She doesn’t revel in chaos; she shapes it, treating discord as raw material for new creations that reflect the world around her.
Seated in her workspace, The Artist – perhaps Eris herself – coats an apple with gold spray paint. The studio is dark and moody. Scrawls of messy graffiti crowd the wall behind her.
In myth, Eris, goddess of discord, hurled a golden apple inscribed “To the Fairest” into a wedding feast, sparking the rivalry between Hera, Athene, and Venus that ultimately led to the Trojan War. Yet the origin of that apple is never explained. Did it come from the Garden of the Hesperides? If so, why would Hera covet it?
In our telling, the apple is a fake – a crafted object, not a divine fruit. The great conflict that followed was waged over nothing but an illusion. The Artist reminds us: a single act of creation – or deception – can unravel an entire world.
04: THE COUNTESS
The Countess stands alone in a room of mirrors, lost in a labyrinth of her own reflections. For some, The Garden of the Hesperides offers the fruits of knowledge and illumination. Others are merely undone by the tender, intoxicating fruit of pure desire.
In the early days of photography, Virginia Oldoini – the Countess of Castiglione – became the most photographed woman in Europe. Born into the Italian aristocracy, she spent her fortune crafting meticulously staged images of herself, each picture an exacting performance of beauty and control. In the courts of the Second French Empire she was known for her scandal, her seductions, her opulent sense of fashion, and the portraits she used to flaunt her conquests and unsettle her rivals. Over time her persona swelled beyond the life beneath it. As her wealth faded and the brilliance of her youth dimmed, she withdrew into mirrored rooms, so consumed by her own image that the world outside began to fade away.
The parallels to the modern age are uncanny. Over 150 years ago, Oldoini pioneered what would become the template for the industrialization of identity and the attention economy that followed, all while staging some of the earliest known experiments in fashion photography. Every choreographed pose, every curated look, was a mirror offered to the world – a reflection feeding an unquenchable need to be seen and to be admired. As The Countess wandered deeper into The Garden, its wondrous fruits ensnared her soul. Desire became her trap, fascination her obsession, and in the end, she was left with nothing. The Garden of the Hesperides is as endless – and merciless – as it is beautiful.
05: THE ORACLE
When every pathway is exhausted, all roads converge upon The Oracle. Her role is not to give you answers, but to provide the framework from which truth becomes inevitable. As a conduit, her function is not always benign. The Oracle sees, she affirms, she assesses, and finally, she judges.
In Egyptian cosmology, the goddess Ma’at embodied harmony, justice, and truth. In the Duat, the underworld, all souls were weighed against her single feather. Thoth, the divine scribe, precisely recorded every procedure. Those whose hearts remained light were allowed to pass into the next realm of the dead; those burdened by heaviness were surrendered to Ammit, the devourer of the unworthy. This was not punishment – this was cosmic accounting.
This image draws deeply from the work of Sun Ra, an early Afro-futurist who understood that freedom required its own cosmology. Rejecting the black and white roles the world had written for him, Sun Ra spent his entire life building a DIY universe from cardboard and leftover scraps of shiny fabric. He claimed to have come from the planet Saturn and created a world large enough for others to step into and thrive on their own terms.
Additional cast, additional research, handmade props, and illustrated cards painted by nephew/cousin Paulo Ruvalcaba made this our most involved setup to this point. We had fun doing some uncle + niece bonding over popcorn, Sun Ra’s movies and concert footage; she was really excited to become Sun Ra for the image. The Mexican Lotería cards are a family reference; it’s a tradition to get together with all the kids over holidays to play.
06: DEATH
Death… the most certain unknown. While many times we experience it as a finite loss, there is another side of the story that exists beyond the veil. Everything around us follows infinite cycles, death being one of the most intense transitional states. There can be deep pain in witnessing all that you love change. Many inimitable qualities of life that we have become viscerally connected to slowly blurring and merging into something unfamiliar, entering metamorphosis. When the pain is felt, accepted and released, the door to endless possibilities opens.
As I painted myself, I couldn’t help but notice all the unique details of my body disappear until I became an unrecognizable, almost formless being. I related this to the process in death of shedding the physical body, and with it, all that you know yourself to be. I can only imagine that state of ultimate surrender. It seems daunting only until I think about the trees, dropping all their leaves, fruit, and eventually their entire bodies to the earth… breaking down completely only to be made new in the soil and take divine form again.
