In Carolina Caycedo’s images, rivers and streams seem to rear up on hind legs. Waterfalls flow backward and sideways, or fan out into kaleidoscopic formations. Her “water portraits,” as she calls them, come with an aesthetic agenda: to reject the convention of the horizontal landscape format as a way to represent nature, a format that she believes has placed humans in a superior position outside of our natural ecosystems.

By giving water sources a multidimensional presence in her videos and images printed onto fabric, the Colombian artist hopes to reorient our relationship to the natural world and the earth’s water supply.

“It’s not just a mineral, or a ‘renewable resource,’ as some people still call water; it’s actually a political agent, a living entity with a soul, with a cobra grande,” she says, invoking the communities that live along the Xingu River in the Amazon, who believe the river’s path has followed the serpentine traces left by a great snake.