Layers make up the foundation of my artistic practice, both in the literal and conceptual sense. My photographic interests focus upon areas of land in which layers of natural and human processes have developed within the same spatial limits, and how these competing influences shape spaces over time. Areas such as neglected construction zones, time-weathered historic sites and various architectural and geographic anomalies attract my lens. Using images of these sites as source material, I import specific photographic fragments into a digital canvas, with the resulting composite image being a depiction of a hypothetical, imagined space. This compositing technique bears some surface similarities to collage in my selection and arrangement of image fragments to construct a scene, but the completed image is a seamless envisioning of a single space. These composites retain their relevance to real-world regions and concerns due to their photographic origins, yet their interpretive possibilities are not constrained by the specifics of time and place of traditional photography.
My work constantly feeds off of the environmental context in which it is produced, and often evolves in ways I do not expect as surprising correlations and patterns appear between image fragments as I arrange them. Despite their origins in images of real locations, my hybrid images are not so much site-specific as they are site-provoked. In creating a composite I attempt to preserve the impression and potentialities of an area but not its geographic particulars that would only resonate with someone familiar with the location. Ultimately the spaces that my amalgamations depict exist independently in their own realms of the imagination, able to be read and appreciated by those not familiar with the locations from which their source material has been gathered.
By using this method of recombinant photography I explore relations both real and hypothetical between the natural, historic and contemporary influences present in environments. I design spaces in which similarities and contrasts between these competing agencies become apparent that would be otherwise overlooked and unremarked on. A main goal of mine is to provoke new insights into our perception of environments and spaces, by taking natural and built forms and re-imagining their context and positioning in the amalgamated image.
Layers in the physical environment correspond to layers in the digital constructed image, and it is this back-and-forth dynamic that propels my work. My composites are not intended to be directly metaphoric or allegorical to real world conditions and concerns, instead they transpose these realities into hypothetical spaces from which they can be observed from unanticipated perspectives. Old assumptions about the ordering and hierarchies of our environment break down; in the frontiers of the digital canvas the possibilities of relations between layers of time, space and processes are manifold.
