Equivalence, 2015-2017

 “To see clouds as paths of flowing dust and air, like paths made by people strolling, is to sense motion as a fundamental process, to feel the kinship between the animate and inanimate.”1 

“The human imagination is spatial and it is constantly constructing an architectonic whole from landscapes remembered or imagined; it progresses from what is closest to what is farther away, winding layers or strands around the single axis, which begins where the feet touch the ground.”2

This collection of work, produced over a period of three years, considers the diverse ecology and impermanent nature of ground and sky. A meditation on what lies above, on the expanse of sky that dwarfs our diminutive stature, opposes an inventory of the ground beneath our feet, the only surface of the city we habitually touch. 

The ground registers the marks of human intervention - it is at once a constructed artifact and an expressive canvas. Bearing witness to our comings and goings, forever shaped and reshaped through time, the ground is co-created by human and non-human beings alike, and continually acted upon by the forces of wind, water, heat and cold. Water sheets across surfaces and percolates into the ground, transporting and collecting material, moving sediment from one place to another. Opportunistic plants and insects inhabit minute fissures in asphalt, stone, and concrete. Humans appropriate the ground as a site of cultural exchange, inscribing images and words to register, if only temporarily, metaphysical truths, thoughts, and ideas. So too the untouchable vault of sky overhead reflects infinite transformation - shifting, decomposing, and reorganizing in every moment. The simple act of tipping one’s head towards the sky implies reflection, rumination and reverie. The camera brings contemplation into focus and provides a scaffold for understanding time and place. We cannot halt time, but we can witness its passage in the physical and material changes of the world above our heads and beneath our feet.

1 Anne Whiston Sprin, “One with Nature: On Landscape, Language, Empathy and Imagination,” in Landscape Theory, eds. James Elkins and Rachel DeLue. (Taylor & Francis, 2008), 40.

2 Czesław Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay. (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982), 7. 

Exhibitions

Equivalence (with Katya Crawford), Rainosek Gallery, Albuquerque NM, March 2016 and Smith Gallery, Fayetteville AR April 11 - June 23, 2016

GRIT: The Urban Landscape, Copley Society of Art, Boston MA, September 12 - November 1, 2014