Ambient Pressure

2017–ongoing | 50+ pigment prints and chromogenic prints, digital video

Ambient Pressure is an ongoing project that draws attention to the ways that photography has literally and conceptually ‘framed’ nature. The artworks were formed through analog and digital interventions in which photographic negatives and prints are manipulated, cut, burned, folded, obstructed, or physically modified. The images were composed twice — once during film capture and then through manipulation of the negatives, scans, and prints with blades, lighters, markers, plastic, rocks, bleach, and other materials. In the second stage of composition, the marks, ruptures, or overlays were used to highlight the fact that photographs are a construction and not a transparent window-on-the-world. The previously straightforward landscape imagery was thus incised with physical intrusions, complicating the scene with additive-erasure. This process — that changes the material surface of the photographs — reveals the photographic conditions which objectify and distance nature from our human experience.