Installation Photographs ‘The Experience of Space’

More info here

Urbanautica Interview for Naturae 2014

I was recently interviewed by Steve Bisson, founder of Urbanautica. The participants were interviewed in conjunction with the exhibition he co-curated with  Ljubica Milov of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Novi Sad, Serbia. You can find my interview here

 

Exhibit ‘The Experience of Space’ Museum of Contemporary Art, Novi Sad , Serbia

I have six pieces included in the group exhibit in Serbia. Exhibit page here

Viewing Drawers at Blue Sky Gallery, Portland

Ten prints from Enclosure  are included in  Blue Sky’s Pacific Northwest Photography Viewing Drawers, Portland, Oregon, juried selection 2014. These prints can be viewed throughout the coming year at Blue Sky.

 

Exhibit at the Benetton Foundation, Treviso, Italy

I am part of a group exhibit that is the result of a group project in December 2012 that concerns a rural area named Zero Branco which is about a half a hour by car  north of Venice. The show opens November 28. http://www.fbsr.it/fbsr.php/it/la_citta/mostre/Zero_Fotografia

‘Discovering the Vernacular Landscape’ by John Brinckerhoff Jackson

From the recent series ‘Enclosure’

‘landscape is not scenery, it is not a political unit; it is really no more than a collection, a system of man-made spaces on the surface of the earth. Whatever its shape or size it is never simply a natural space,a feature of the natural environment; it is always artificial, always synthetic, always subject to sudden or unpredictable change. We create them and need them because every landscape is the place where we establish our own human organization of space and time.It is where the slow, natural processes of growth and maturity and decay are deliberately set aside and history is substituted. A landscape is where we speed up or retard or divert the cosmic program and impose our own’. - John Brinckerhoff Jackson

Uncommon Ground edited by William Cronon

From the series ‘Sign, Symbol and Nature’

Here are some Cronon quotes from ‘Uncommon Ground’

“But the trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world. The dream of an unworked natural landscape is very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves had to work the land to make a living–urban folk for whom food comes from a supermarket or a restaurant instead of a field, and for whom the wooden houses in which they live and work apparently have no meaningful connection to the forests in which trees grow and die. Only people whose relation to the land was already alienated could hold up wilderness as a model for human life in nature, for the romantic ideology of wilderness leaves precisely nowhere for human beings actually to make their living from the land.”

“This, then, is the central paradox: wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall. The place where we are is the place where nature is not. . . .To the extent that we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civilization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles. We thereby leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like.

“Worse: to the extent that we live in an urban-industrial civilization but at the same time pretend to ourselves that our real home is in the wilderness, to just that extent we give ourselves permission to evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead. . . .We work our nine-to-five jobs in its institutions, we eat its food, we drive its cars (not least to reach the wilderness), we benefit from the intricate and all too invisible networks with which it shelters us, all the while pretending that these things are not an essential part of who we are. By imagining that our true home is in the wilderness, we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit. In its flight from history, in its siren song of escape, in its reproduction of the dangerous dualism that sets human beings outside of nature–in all of these ways, wilderness poses a serious threat to responsible environmentalism at the end of the twentieth century.”–by William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness