Phyllis Ma

Mushroom & Friends and Special Nothing are publications from Phyllis Ma, a New York-based artist working in still life photography and animation. She was a co-founder of LAZY MOM, a food art collaboration active from 2014–2018. The second installment of Phyllis Ma’s magazine expands on the photography of foraged and cultivated mushrooms in phantasmagoric settings. Familiar gilled mushrooms are featured alongside spongy, stalkless and club-like fungi. The collection is then juxtaposed with visceral props – a sliced orange powdered with tumeric, purple daisies on green sugar, the veiny texture of a cabbage leaf – and transformed into otherworldly, Dr. Seussian assemblages.