“All we see is image, but we do not know of what.”
I make landscape photographs that explore ways of seeing nature and the meanings we attach to landscape imagery. Employing conventions of landscape painting, nature photography and land art, my work underlines tensions between actual landscapes and the “landscape of the mind”, between the real and the ideal.
By mimicking and manipulating conventional pictorial devices and exploiting photography’s lie of verisimilitude, I aim to create visual dissonances that challenge viewers to square what they see with what they expect to see, questioning how beliefs and expectations influence perception and representation.
Interwoven with issues of perception and meaning are concerns about process, especially the perennial question of what distinguishes taking from making in regards to photographic production. My images are created using a digital camera but they are not digital composites. They are in many cases photographs of photographs.
P A R A D I S E S
Paradises explores the myth of the American wilderness with its roots in 19th C. creationism, nationalism and manifest destiny as perpetuated in the idealized picturesque landscape. This pictorial history lingers in our collective memories, but its connection to how we see and experience nature today is ambiguous. Roderick Frazier Nash famously described wilderness as “not so much a place as a feeling about a place —a perceived reality, a state of mind.” Can romanticized landscape imagery evoke more than nostalgia for obsolete feelings and beliefs? Perhaps it can provide distraction from current climate catastrophes in the same way it diverted attention from the ravages of westward expansion, treading the fine line between perception and deception.
E R D A 'S R E A L M
Erda’s Realm imagines seen and unseen forces that shape and animate the natural world. Challenging the visual vocabulary of the idealized picturesque landscape, these images represent the natural world as inscrutable system, rather than static tableau. With allusions to animism and earth spirituality, this work is both a record of my immediate environment and a personal idiosyncratic vision of nature. Living close to the land allows for daily observation of the processes of growth, decay, regeneration and transformation that create ever-evolving landscapes.
I N P A S S I N G
In Passing is a meditation on environmental fragility filtered through contemporary landscape vocabularies. Beginning in the 1960’s, the Land Art and Earthworks movements broke through the pictorial constraints of the landscape genre to establish new forms that prioritized direct physical engagement with nature. These groundbreaking advancements freed artists from the confines of the gallery, pushing art out into the natural world. But due to its site-specific nature, land art artists have often relied on photographic and written documentation to disseminate their work, linking what is essentially a sculptural and experiential genre back to a two-dimensional visual language. This dialectic between place and idea of place sets up ambiguities expressive of tensions that arise when contemplating the relationship between art and environment.
L A S T S T R A W
Last Straw reflects on our attachment to the myth of rural America. Folksy imagery and kitsch perpetuates a fantasy of idyllic rural living appealing to fleeing urban dwellers and retirees pursuing their country dreams. But nostalgia for an imagined country lifestyle often ignores the real challenges facing agricultural communities and family farms threatened by climate change, industrial agri-business and encroaching suburban sprawl. Yet we find comfort believing in a rural idyll that has largely been co-opted as a marketing device for tourism and development.
References
•"All we see is image, but we do not know of what.” —Jean-Philippe Antoine, from Photography, Painting and the Real; The Question of Landscape in the Painting of Gerhard Richter
In a section titled The Lie of the Landscape, Antoine underscores Richter’s own description of his landscapes as “liars” in this way: “What is staged in the landscapes is, once again, not the illusory nature of representation, but the projective quality of the idea of Nature embodied in the landscape.” In analyzing this merging of representation with idea, Antoine asserts that “It belongs to the very structure of the human gaze and makes the relationship between reality and image undecidable."
•The “landscape of the mind” is a phrase Ben Tufnell uses in the introduction to In Land, Writings about Land Art and it’s Legacies, his influential collection of essays which broadened the conceptual framework for what has been categorized as Land art and Earthworks. This expanded genre includes a diverse range of works in multiple mediums that, though they defy easy labels, share a defining aspect of the original Land art movement —a direct engagement with nature or the idea of nature. “In Land art, idea, process and experience are prioritized above objecthood."