The Landscape, Earth Intervened – WIP
I have always been fascinated by the built environment. For the last 20 years I have photographed the interiors of urban remains – seeking beauty in lapsed places, and building fictions about who might have once occupied them. Trespassing through these spaces directly informed me about industry, capitalism, constructions of faith, institutional behaviors, and poverty.
I am also fascinated by the ability of birds to remain in the sky, soaring, flying – seeking prey, water, and/or land for respite – how marvelous it would be, to be able to look and listen, seemingly with senses uninterrupted by the din of world?
During the early months of the pandemic, I started looking and photographing with a drone. At the time I was working for an arboretum and immediately I began photographing the gardens, collections, and gene banks – trying to communicate in images that the land was much more than a park, that it was in fact that a human-managed property of endangered and rare woody tree species that had only a half century before been a field! And then I began to examine and explore the communities around me through the same lens.
Planted on the ground, I study the surface of the earth through the controller viewscreen that fits in the palm of my hand, looking and framing moments of light, the relationship between the elements, the built environment that is on a molecular level constituted of the natural world.
These abstracted, fragments of the earth captured in rectangles from above are for slow looking, akin to the practice of deep listening refined by the late Pauline Oliveros – to listen deeply is to learn about ourselves and the world around us.
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