INTRODUCTION My studio practice uses photography, analog/digital collage and assemblage to investigate the landscape in a broad sense of that word — places I’ve been, seen, and felt —responding to materiality, memory, discomfort, and ambiguity.
IN A LANDSCAPE This project is an investigation of how the tension between nature and the built environment, the search for inherent beauty in an imperfect world, and the uncertainty and fragmentation arising from memory and the passing of time inform how I perceive the landscape. Kandinsky reminds us that ‘music is the ultimate teacher’, and an important source of inspiration for this work is, ‘In a Landscape’, John Cage’s minimalist composition for solo piano or harp. Two images from this series were exhibited at the Upstream Gallery in Hasting-on-Hudson, NY during February, 2021. This body of work was the subject of a solo exhibit at the Kennedy-Douglass Center for the Arts in Florence, AL during September/October, 2021. Three images from this series were part of a group show at the Gadsden Museum of Art in late 2021 and early 2022.
TONE POEM The poet Peter Gizzi asks, “What if it is all music?” While our initial response to a photograph is often, “What is it?”, it is my hope that emotions and other sensations also may be conveyed or provoked by an image. This series begins with Guzzi’s question and invites the experience of non-narrative connections within a sequence of photographs.
COLLAGE In 2024, I began a systematic study of the medium of collage. In this series of work, rather than using found materials, physical prints of my own work are cut up and then reassembled into a unique work using scissors and glue. These are small scale works which are all mounted in 16x20 in frames.
PHOTOMONTAGE Referencing Debord’s concept of ‘drifting’, multiple photographs captured in a specific location are combined using photo-collage techniques in order to explore how physical space is mapped in memory as we experience a new place. The first image from this series, titled ‘Mapping Bologna’, was exhibited in a juried photography show in Auburn, AL in 2020.
BIBB COUNTY GLADES 2021 After completing a complex studio-based project, I found myself wanting to spend time outdoors in the open landscape with a camera, photographing. Remembering that William Christenberry had made photographs in this place over 30 years ago, I felt drawn to visit the Bibb County Glades myself in Fall 2021.
GRID Formal studies of photographic shape and form are spatially organized on a grid in order to obscure cues about scale. The grid structure is also intended to suggest the existence of a time line, while allowing the viewer to invent their own sequence as part of the experience of the piece.
INSTALLATION PHOTOS Representative examples of installed work can be viewed here.