I have always been interested in how the objects around me are transformed by nature once they become discarded. Everything that is created goes through a life cycle; objects decay because of rain and rot, but they also grow into new forms by merging with plants and mold that transform their surfaces. By exploring many photographic processes, my work in this exhibition represents different aspects of decay. Like the farmer, I am able to stand back and watch nature take its course. By documenting and decaying the object, I am able to make connections between my own idealized view of representation, and how I am able to shift my perception of these places and my perception of them as images. I want a tension within the image that is created between the preciousness of the surface and the depreciated aesthetic of its source. I am interested in finding visually compelling aspects of these decayed objects; finding beauty where we wouldn't normally go looking for it.

Damián Ortega is a contemporary artist who works with found objects- everything from Volkswagen Beetles to bricks. In his artwork Resting Matter (Brazil), Ortega documents found bricks piles, a common practice in Brazil, in various forms relating to the architecture around them. Each of these forms are photographed and displayed next to each other. His work looks at both the social and cultural situations that are imbedded in certain objects. Through their transformation, Ortega's work tells us something different about our relationship to them as objects. In my own work, I document buildings that are ready-made objects. I am interested in the interaction between the buildings and the natural elements that overtake each structure. Abandoned buildings hold a sense of nostalgia because within them there are untold histories. The image after I documents the last remaining wall of a structure that I found while exploring the surrounding fields and forest of my childhood home. While I remember this building as it once stood—an old house or barn—, now all that remains is only a fragment of its memory, held up by vines and an old tree. I wondered who might have lived there or what it could have been used for, but also why and where did the people that inhabited this space go? These kinds of questions become inherent in the use of photography because of its ability to frame a subject and ask us the question of what the image conveys and why we are looking at it

I found that looking at William Christenberry's photographs of his hometown in Alabama were a big help in trying to think about the way a photograph can tell a story similar to the one I try to tell through my photographs. His photographic series, Building with False Brick Siding, documents a single structure's disappearance into the landscape over the period of 35 years. Christenberry continually revisited and photographed the natural growth that was taking place over this structure as kudzu and new growth forest over took it. His photographs not only document the passage of time, but they also show how the surface of these buildings is drastically changed by nature reclaiming itself. These were situations that I was trying to express in my own photographs. Similar to Christenberry's photographs, I took advantage of the frame that my camera created to isolate each structure, looking at the buildings straight on. Each photograph is a portrait of the structures I've documented for the viewer to interact with.

In exploring different spaces to find subjects to photograph, I consistently found myself coming back to structures that I had grown up with. Many of these buildings were abandoned houses, barns, and shacks. Growing up, there was an old house next to the post office on my road that friends and I would explore during middle school. At the time the house was still standing, however, it had still long since been abandoned. Vandals had come through and cleared the place out, leaving behind their presence through graffiti and other forms of damage. What I remember most about this house, though, is not the destruction that others had left, but how much the earth had taken a toll on this building. Much of the façade was covered in ivy and other vines that had begun to strip the paint and twist the wood sides. In the interior, water had leaked through holes in the roof, causing the wood floors to rot, and mold to grow throughout many of the rooms. Nature was slowly taking this building over and reclaiming the land.

I revisited this house a few time over the past year, and found how much had changed from my view of this structure over the past 10 years. Today it is almost invisible. The vines and ivy have completely taken over all 4 sides of the house and even the roof, which has now collapsed. The plant life is so dense that you cannot get through the door, and with the roof in its present state, there probably isn't much left of the interior of the building. The form of the building had become a ghost, outlined in intrusive plants. The wood sides and shingled roof had swelled and buckled. These elements created a beautiful reimagining of this place, which no longer belonged to man, but now belonged to nature.

After reflecting on my history with these different abandoned buildings (from houses to outhouses) that I grew up exploring, I felt there was much more that I was interested in besides them as architectural forms. I was fascinated in the process of decay, and how I could utilize it as part of my practice in making art objects. By using the transformative qualities of decay, I began to allow the images in my photographs to change; parts of the image would disappear, but new colors, forms, and textures were added. Throughout making this body of work, I not only work with photography, but rather a wide range of media that allows layers to build in the work, which transform the photographs into a ambiguous realm of visual aesthetics.

Before I began decaying photographs, the tension that I saw in Roxy Paine's work was one I hoped to achieve in my own. In his body of work Replicants, Paine meticulously recreates mold, fungi, and invasive species with fiberglass, resin, lacquer, and oil. Each sculpture sits in a moment of silence, stuck in time, but is still activated by the lifelikeness that he represents. Paine also uses scale to shift our perception of the objects he is sculpting. Paine's work Dry Rot transforms something that is inherently ugly when it takes place in our homes into something beautiful when displayed against the equalizing white wall of the gallery. There is a tension between the perceived ugliness or un-wanted qualities of rot, and the beauty and desirability that is found in Paine's objects through the use of synthetic materials.

As I began to look at my decaying photographs, I found I was able to achieve this needed tension. That tension was evident because instead of just displaying the physically damaged photograph, I re-photographed it as if it were an object to attain a flat and clean surface that appeared moldy and soiled. By presenting the objects in this way, the illusion of texture and surface appears through the flatness of the paper. Re-photographing the original object also allows me to play with scale; they start as small objects--around eight to ten inches--but are then scaled as large as 5 feet tall. In oct 23 jan 8, scale adds to the obscurity of the image by changing our relationship to the mold and tears, which appear much larger than their source. There are also instances in this piece where the surface of the silver-gelatin print lifted off, and through re-photographing it, these parts appear to pop off of the surface of the smooth paper, creating another sense of illusion. Similarly, works from the series weathered have this tension even though their scale shift is not as drastic, only doubling in size. The decaying elements from the original photographs in this series come only through color and mild texture changes. This adds to the deception of them appearing to be the original object. Rather than being decayed and simply mounted, the surfaces are instead clean and the viewer engages with the artwork. This tension between what one thinks he or she sees and what really exists causes the viewer to question what they are really looking at.

With this new body of work I am able to use photographic and sculptural elements to create a final work of art. By laying the photographs in different processes, adding and subtracting information from the image along the way, the end result of each artwork is not only grounded in the documentation of the buildings, but also the documentation of the decaying photographs as subject matter.

This final body of work did not come easy. There was a lot of trial and error, exploring and then pulling back. At times I deviated so far from my original intentions and how I really felt about my surroundings that I wasn't sure how I could bring my ideas to fruition. However, the thoughts and ideas that I began with in my SMP experience came full circle. I wanted to explore my personal relationship with nature and find through art making how I could reflect my own personal ideals and interests to the viewer. I sought to explore abandoned spaces, both in architecture and in the landscape, and use their qualities to influence my artwork and artistic process. This is only the beginning of my process in exploring spaces through the lens of photography and also in exploring the qualities of decay and what both have to say about the world we live in.