Desert Pictures
2014 | chromogenic photograms, digital video, gelatin silver solar prints, acrylic and light sculpture
chromogenic photograms created from plants, animals, and minerals
Desert Pictures explores the notion of landscape through a series of images, objects and photo-driven experiments. Informed by a formative years in the deserts of the Southwestern United States, this work considers how desert environments are imaged and framed: can the spatial, perceptual, temporal, biological, and chemical of a place be embodied photographically? By focusing on optics, light, minerals, surface, time, and chemical and digital interactions this project incorporates these essential components of photography and video-imaging in order to reveal the conditions of representation. Desert Pictures was made in collaboration with the desert environment using minerals, rain, and the sun. A variety of approaches explore the materiality of analogue and digital media to suggest alternative ways to represent the multifaceted aspects of an environment, expanding the representation of environment far beyond the traditions of pictorial landscape photography.
Desert Pictures was developed during a fellowship at the Center for Creative Photography and works from this series are now part of their permanent collection.
untitled (sun), 1:00 minute preview of 2:33 video, looped
The video untitled (sun) engages with the idea of landscape representation through unconventional manipulations of imaging media. In the mid-day brightness of Northern Mexico, a digital camera was pointed directly at the sun, purposely causing overexposure of the image’s individual pixels. The chromatic aberrations caused by the malfunction of the camera’s sensor reveal the aesthetic possibilities of failure, depicting the sun as an ever-changing column of light, fringed with green and purple radiations. This sensor ‘bloom’ transforms the image of the sun while exposing the medium’s limits of representation.
untitled (Torus in 3 Space, 4 Dimensional Hypercube, Heterotic Superstring), etched arcylic panels, red, green, and blue light
selection from untitled (desert rain), gelatin silver paper, desert rain, gold toner
