For me, the process of image-making is an effort to compress time and space within a surface. Like terrain, I consider the picture plane as a moldable surface containing embedded layers. Paper texture, fabric weave, film grain, and digital aberrations all echo perceptual interferences such as heat waves, dust, and sand. Throughout my works on paper, textiles, and video, the surface of the Earth can be seen as a corollary to the surfaces of other planets, such as the moon and Mars. In seeking out terrestrial analogues, I connect the intimacy of touching ground in an unfamiliar place with an encounter that is only accessible through devices, data, and imagination.
Imagery for these works comes from photographs I make in the deserts of Qatar and Southern California, volcanoes in the Azores and Central America, geology specimens from glass lantern slides, paper models I build, as well as reels of silver gelatin printed images from the Viking Landers taken on Mars in the mid-1970s. Methods of planetary imaging, and the history of optics, perspective, and pictorial space inform this work, which examines how meaning can be altered from one translation to the next while still appearing as an accurate account.
