Wish You Were Here explores vacation culture amidst the climate crisis and how it plays, often unconsciously, into what’s known as last-chance tourism.
Last-chance tourism is a trend whereby travellers visit destinations that are being irreparably changed by the climate crisis and may eventually vanish altogether. The more tourists who visit these environments, and the more widespread the climate crisis becomes, the more last-chance tourism grows. In exploring this topic, Palmer examines the absurdity that capitalist and colonialist structures (like tourism) imbue into our natural world.

With the work spanning four continents over ten years, viewers immerse themselves in these locales that have been seared into their minds as idyllic, dreamlike destinations alongside the happy vacationers who are witnessing fading coral reefs, melting glaciers, and sea-level rise threatening coastal communities worldwide. With 2023 being the hottest year on record, ecosystems and humans are struggling to adapt to an ever-changing world that is inching toward the 1.5-degree threshold set out in the Paris Agreement.

The cognitive dissonance between the constructed realities of leisure time and the climate crisis is intentional in Palmer’s visual style to create juxtaposed, dream-like, hauntological records that evoke nostalgia and longing, while the accompanying captions and deeper context present the dark truth being observed.