This work is my response to the lonely landscape. Whether one defines landscape literally as land, sea, and sky or more expansively as both inner and outer worlds matters not. It is a vacuum that, for some reason, I need to fill. When I started this process several years ago, I felt that it was the lost characters from old photographs that needed grounding and placement in my world's landscapes. Now I realize that, conversely, it is I who needed them.
When I first started this series as part of my M.F.A. graduate show, Desolation's Comfort: Photographic Re-collections, the landscapes were pastoral and pristine. Now the work is moving towards darker places; old bunkers, fortifications, and areas of industrial ruin. Like the shadows of the psyche, these forgotten venues represent the things we'd prefer to ignore or forget. Yet, they are there, places as lonely as any other.
The characters that populate my landscapes are enigmas. Mostly, they come to us from times past, their earthly presence now only ghostly images on forgotten and tattered photographs. Many I knew personally as a small boy, some were known only from oral histories told to me by elders. Others remain a complete and utter mystery.
Just as the universe constantly recombines in myriad ways, these compositions have come together in this place and time. They tell a story that is probably unique to each beholder. All of these humans, totem animals, and desolate lands have come to me separately at some time, in some way. They have all been personal discoveries. All have been gifts. Now they have been recombined here before you. If there is something unsettling to be found, it might be that recontextualization has a way of surprising us with its naked truth.
I now present them to you so that you might find something of yourself in these images. Your interpretation and response is a vital part of the swirling magic of life and death and rebirth again. Your imagination is just what I need to make this project complete.
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