Enter Nature

Enter Nature plays on a double address. One interpretation urges a being, presumed to be human, to return to the fold of nature. Yet the phrase can also been read as a stage direction making nature a protagonist, not setting, of the play. This body of work explores the landscape genre and deconstructs modes of representation used to separate human experience from our physical environment. In 34.372515, -119.252337, Looking North, a landscape is fractured by tossed shards of broken mirror. The mirror reflects the environment in 360 degrees, inverts the hierarchy of ground to sky plane, and captures a glimpse of the apparatus of the camera and photographer. In lieu of the objectification embedded in a vanishing point, the image compresses and complicates the distance between viewer and viewed. State of Nature captures a selection of objects grouped and sequenced along a spectrum of a vanishing nature. The qualities evolve from wild to cultivated to the engineered, manufactured and digitized. Yet the categories slip and fail to hold. Images of wild elements are copied over in the digital. Objects are photographed in the air and entropy looms. And the blue monochrome of the prints suggests an oceanic and ominously submerged final resting state. The Hereabout collages thread mink fur through a selection of found photographs. The luxurious material, evocative of a body, nestles and blends into the rich blacks of the silver gelatin landscapes. In the video Idaho, a potato slowly rolls across a horizon line in the California desert. The potato recalls a history of famine, and migratory uproot, through to an apotheosis in unsustainable industrial farming techniques. In the context of a daunting and aridifying landscape, its absurd presence also grimly foreshadows precarity and a future struggle to survive.