My work is an attempt to understand my personal disconnection with the natural world as well as an exercise to regain that perspective and awareness.  The availability and immediacy of distraction and stimulation are characteristic of our culture, and effectively displace us psychologically from this most fundamental element of existence.  We consume that which is duplicated, commodified and propagated while we reminisce and sentimentalize the natural world.

My work investigates the rift between the environment and cultural experience using the defamiliarization and recombination of natural imagery.  Re-contextualized landscape imagery remaps physical, cognitive, and ultimately emotional relationships with the natural world.  The signs of disparate elements reconsider signified meaning through atypical representation: simplification, exaggeration, relocation or deletion.  The blending of the fantastical and the mundane, the beautiful and the abject, mirror the plurality and interrelatedness of nature.

The landscape within the work is not a topographical depiction of a unique location, but a universal depiction of many landscapes decoded by the viewer’s personal algorithms.  The legibility of the work reflects a recalled landscape: as sensory experience and emotion influence memory, the imagery in my work integrates the concrete and the atmospheric.  Focus shifts, earth-forms emerge, material dissolves and recognition disappears altogether.