Blasted Tree

This body of work, Assembling the View, relies on combination and alteration. Working with digital images, I blend related photos and use post-production tools to create landscapes exploiting unexpected perspectives and other visual torsion – and to reinvigorate the landscape photograph.

These landscape images defy conventional form, abandoning the rectangle and fidelity to their “subject.” Image areas of atypical shape claim attention, as viewers pause to interpret these novel visual objects. Multiple, simultaneous points of view, hinged planes, or other kinds of fragmentation activate the images, not as facsimiles of our world, but as new creations reminding us that a photograph is just an illusion. The depth we might habitually sense in a photograph may be jarringly interrupted by breaks in the image area or distorted by apparent folds in the illusory space. As a result, the work moves beyond traditional landscape photography to develop new, engagingly structured images.

These images may prompt viewers to reflect on the suspension of disbelief they so willingly grant to a photograph. But at the same time, they can find fresh, absorbing visions of landscape in these compiled and altered views – perhaps oddly familiar, perhaps strangely alien. My goal in this work is to build images that engage attention, as objects themselves, through their twist on mimetic representation – through fragmentation and alteration of views assembled from our world.