THE DISTANCE BETWEEN US (BROUGHT ME BACK TO YOU) (2021)
The desert is many things to me. It’s a well-worn, enduring source of artistic inspiration. It’s an idyllic retreat from society where one can redefine the self. It’s the backdrop to an over-romanticized myth this country comforts itself in retelling. And, for a coastal Southern Californian like myself, what was once a possible future, is now an environmental certainty. These ‘identities’ are not mutually exclusive and it’s the simultaneity of these realities that become the aesthetic and conceptual framework for these images as reimagined landscapes. Drawn from snapshots I made during a road trip to Las Vegas from San Diego by way of Los Angeles (and back again), The distance between us (brought me back to you) visualizes the changing desert terrain as opposing horizons conjoined by the sky. As the point of connection between landscapes, the sky ties these shifting perceptions of the desert into coherent new realities.
WANDERING (TOPOGRAPHIES) (2014-Ongoing) documents sites marked by memories of encounters with men but visualized as straight documentary landscapes devoid of sentimentality. Collectively, the images are a forensic mapping of desire and memory, a visual diary framed by the rigor of straight photographic representation. Using only references to a name and the street, the lack of detail hints at a clandestine, even closeted, rendezvous of which the only evidence of the encounter is an image taken after the fact. Wandering (Topographies) is visually and stylistically inspired by Eugene Atget and the photographers of the New Topographics. The banal repetition and severe geometry of the built Southern California landscape serves as a backdrop for an intense, if fleeting, intimacy.