Artist Statement
Someday you and I will no longer exist, all records of our work will be lost, and it will be as if we had never existed at all. In The Disappearance a free falling man is in limbo, coming from nowhere and about to disappear into nothing. He is here for an instant and this, for him, is all there is. And it is all there is for us.
My work takes the human condition as its central theme and examines the most fundamental of issues: the inexplicable fact of our existence, the ungraspable experience of time, and the illusive and unknowable nature of reality. It calls attention to our misperceptions: the gulf that exists between how we see and how we think we see; how we think and how we think we think; and the inconstant and constructed nature of memory.
We often say, photographs “capture” time. But to capture something is not to understand it because in the act of capture the thing is changed. My recent work aims at a photography that can speak to the passage of time closer to how it is actually experienced. For example, within the image Three Moments are three highly labored records of moments, each a month apart, each isolated and made into physical objects. The second moment attempts to recapture the first, while the third attempts to recapture them both. The result is meant to feel like a return to a place that may not seem to have changed, yet- since every instance of time and place is singular- it is perpetually and irrevocably being lost.
The making of Dust to Dust began with an observation about the way the sun traverses across the sky: that other than solar noon when the sun is the highest it will get, every other moment during the day has a twin moment when the height of the sun relative to the horizon is identical. From this observation I realized I could recreate a scene, including the light and shadows falling on it, by rotating an object and carefully timing my shots. In the resulting diptych a gravel mound appears to have remained stationary while the landscape itself appears to have moved. The same material that was used to create first one mound, then the second, is now part of the foundation of somebody’s house. The piece is a meditation on impermanence and the fact that not only existence but even the features of the physical world are temporal and will come to an end.
My photographs are documentations of sculptures and installations but they are also records of actions and elaborate processes. Days are spent, sometimes with a crew but more often in solitude, silently driving, carrying supplies, erecting structures and sets, and studying the slow progress of the sun overhead and its all-powerful, comfort-giving and –taking effects. Created in close collaboration with the movements of the sun, precisely observed, I see my photographs as acts of reverence and participation in a deep, reassuring natural order outside of and much larger than myself.