Artist’s Statement

My artwork explores our perception of the landscape by drawing attention to the relativity of our memories of the natural world, using painting, collage, and projection as metaphors, proxies and surrogates to explore of issues of permanence and impermanence. Most of my work is developed within the studio walls and is grounded in a sense of longing dependent on my frequent excursions to the mountains and the sea. My sketchbook is a constant companion as I stop to take field notes when hiking, climbing, skiing, or sailing.

In Untitled Marine Vistas, my most prolific series, I perform an abstracted analogue of the act of recollection by exploring how memory reduces the features of a landscape to their most basic elements and how these simplified elements act as a stimulus for recalling places both visited and imagined. The Strata series of collages draws on decontextualized images of sea, sky, and land from travel magazines in an attempt to explore the layers of imagery and memory that come together to form our understanding of landscape, which is so often far removed from direct experience. In the Plastic Landscapes series, I create images by filtering light through compositions of discarded plastic to expose a cyanotype solution. Plastic trash thus becomes a vehicle for composing and projecting a nostalgic vista, imagining how future humans might conceive of landscape if no pristine areas of the world remain. I have also used projected light in concert with paintings to explore our relationship with the landscape. In the Moving Mountains series, I use projection to selectively map fields of colored light onto painted canvases. Landmasses move freely across horizons not only along the x-axis of the canvas, but also spanning time and three-dimensional space. They emerge from traditional points of painted perspective within the canvas, and from pinpoint sources of digital projection. MarDesierto/DesertSea is an interactive multi-channel video-mapped installation combining four projections of the desert and the sea. When a viewer enters the space, he or she disrupts the path of the projection, subtracting time, space, and light and thus changing the landscape.