Geographical Lore

My series, Geographical Lore, is a selection of photographic works that consider ways in which the natural world can be represented particularly within landscapes like forests, mountain ranges and desert terrain where I have recently traveled in California, New Mexico and Nevada as well as areas along the east coast of the US. The impetus for this work comes from my interests in natural reserves, protected lands, wilderness areas, and the photographic documentation of the ever-changing diverse geography within and between these locations. My camera as a recording device, I am looking for complexities of both stability and change that occurs over time in the natural world. For instance, low and high tide zones, tidal pools, forest ecology, geologic processes, and astrological explorations. By using the photograph as source material, it creates another way of understanding the subject and allows for an imagined space to expand upon. Through this work I experiment with ideas of abstraction and representation, manipulation, constructing/deconstructing images of these documented spaces/places. And explore how environments function and evolve, at times depicting a façade or fabricated reality that examines spatial relationships, scale shifts, and materiality/structure. The series consists of a combination of two-dimensional images like framed photographs, broadsides, light-boxes, and three-dimensional objects such as cut and manipulated photographs and artist books. They combine photographic images of both the natural world and hand-made, assembled environments. The deliberate blend of the fabricated and the "real" image play with ideas of memory and representation.