I am an artist working in video, sculpture, and photography. My practice engages landscape and its mythologies. I am interested in the complex relationship between nature and landscape, and the ways in which humans construct ideas of landscape through idiosyncratic combinations of fantasy, myth, desire, and technology. My videos combine scenes of different types of landscapes—desert, rural, industrial—with abstract imagery and poetic text fragments. I make landscape photographs that blur traditional boundaries between documentation and representation: employing subtle distortions of color and perspective to create superflat pictures that are recognizable yet estranged versions of familiar scenes. My sculptures refer to objects that mediate our experience of landscape, such as road signs and cars. Ultimately, my work asks questions about how the histories and myths of landscapes inform individuals’ sense of selfhood.
My current body of work explores landscapes in relation to ideas of the American dream and its dissolution. I make text pieces that come from a journal where I reflect on my time in the USA. I record short phrases from public signage, another medium deployed to mediate human experience of space through instructions, missives, and guidelines. I am likewise interested in the literal vehicles used to traverse landscapes and the vast open spaces that characterize the American wilderness. In an ongoing series of relief sculptures, I explore the motif of the SUV, which I embed in a substrate that evokes the shape of a phone or tablet. The SUV is the ultimate adventure vehicle, a cult-like symbol marketed as a secular deliverer, protector of its intrepid inhabitants and libido enhancer, but it is also a symbol of environmental destruction. The glossy sheen of a new SUV—a surface quality I conjure in the reliefs—manifests in my abstract sculptures, which look poured, dripped, and melted. Meant to evoke various states of inchoate matter, they are alternately legible as natural and machinic. My sculptures thus expose a third space—neither wholly nature or culture—created by ongoing incursion, dominion, and desire levied by humans on their surrounding environs.