One of the main reasons why I chose to attend St. Mary’s College was because of its location, or more importantly its landscape: the river, the relationship between the water and the land, the air and the smells, as well as the crosswalks and architecture. All of these are a part of this landscape and help me to define this place. I am interested in how we as humans relate to and view our surroundings and thus create our own personal landscapes. My body of work re-defines scenes of natural beauty in a way that questions this relationship and calls attention to the intrusiveness of mankind by juxtaposing and overlapping images and sound.

Because I want to fully engage the viewer I use both video projections and large digital prints obtained from video grabs. I find these mediums to be much more effective in expressing my ideas than the charcoal landscape drawings and small digital prints I had used in the past. Many of my ideas stem from the works of Eadweard Muybridge and Karen Halverson because each of these artists uses photography in a unique way to present a truth. I have combined Muybridge’s scientific approach and Halverson’s subtle documentary style to create work that is both accurate and thought provoking by taking images and sounds directly from my surroundings and presenting them my own documentary style that enhances its validity. These current works have a timelessness quality to them that draws on Bill Viola’s use of ambiguity created through repeated forms and elements as well as freeze frames and looping. By creating a question as to the time frame of the work, I also want to pose the question “do these images still exist?”

In addition to my use of the moving image, still images make up just one part of my work and are presented as large-scale, digitally manipulated representations of the world around us. These scenes allude to the grandness of 19th century American landscape photography both in their scale and subject matter. However, unlike the photographers of that time period who created images of raw nature in all its wondrous glory, I create images of nature that documents how it has been altered, sometimes unintentionally and often unnecessarily by the hand of man. We live in a society that extends past strictly human contact. If my work can change the viewer’s perspective about their relationship with their natural surroundings, then my goals have been met.

 

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