Artist Statement

I typically work on long-term projects embodied in physical form as either a fine print or within a handmade artist book.

I find inspiration for my work from photographers and other artists, as well as music, literature, cinema, history, and science. Inspirational photographers include Hiroshi Sugimoto, Emmet Gowin, and Edward Burtynsky, and equally as important are painters such as Agnes Martin, Sol Lewitt, and Mark Rothko, Chinese landscape painting, and Japanese ukiyo-e prints.

My earlier projects explored how we seek to explain our role in the Universe via story or myth, how we seek out natural rhythms and cycles and interconnectedness, how we seek to impose order on what we experience, and how we seek to understand the workings of the Universe itself. These earlier projects include Adventures in Celestial Mechanics (full moon), Pyrotechnic (abstracted fireworks), and Harmony of the Spheres (abstracted night skies).

My current work, Annals of the Former World, advocates for a changed relationship with the environment, particularly with respect to climate change. Annals includes a growing set of projects within it, all evocative of the apocalyptic sublime. It is my testimony to the wonder of the natural world as we found it, serving as my record of this world for my own daughter and future generations, both what we had and what we lost, an elegy for a world that will never be the same.

In The Anthropocene Surveys, part of the Annals project, I have imagined a future history where photographers, inspired by the Great Surveys of the American West after the Civil War, conducted the Anthropocene Surveys to document what would soon be lost for the benefit of future generations. This future history culminates in a museum exhibition in the year 2124 that looks back to our current times to introduce museum visitors of the twenty-second century to the wonders of the early twenty-first century via photographs and captions.

In A Field Guide to the Pyrocene, part of the Annals project, I photograph landscapes threatened by climate change, make prints of these photographs, and then burn each print. This allows me to reassemble the remains into new compositions, creating entirely new works scarred by the effects of fire. Fire was the critical tool in the creation of our current civilization, and its unfettered use will perhaps be its downfall.