Free 7 page press release with multiple images or single page release. Installation views at Galerie Karsten Greve / Paris for my Exhibition.
Since my first series Nature Morte, which began my life long series “Rethinking the Natural,” I have been obsessed with the concepts of wonder, seeing and photographic mark making. My journey has also been a kind of spiritual quest that was not consciously present at the beginning but grew over time from making the work.
If you take the time and look closely multiple layers emerge that are at the core of the work. In addition, I am also distilling the process of "seeing” (Both physically and spiritually). These images are my meditations and are a constant through my life’s work. The other parallel line of thought that has accompanied me for years is the fundamental connection between drawing and photography. These two disciplines have fed off each other since the invention of The Camera Obscura. I can remember being transfixed one day in a Vermeer exhibition staring at the highlights on a wine glass and knowing full well that he was looking through a lens of some kind. Years later I discovered David Hockney’s thesis, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Master. In it he presents irrefutable evidence that the Renaissance masters were greatly aided by the Camera Obscura. Essentially drawing and photography have walked hand in hand through art history starting with the invention of the lens and optics. I have spent most of my life mining the areas that fall between these two linked art forms.
With the River and Halos Series I returned to the documentary tradition but added my own twist to it. In the River Series, the photographic document can also be read as type of drawing when viewed from a distance yet up close a record of yet another infinite system that is at our feet whenever we stand at the river’s edge. These pictures are of reflections. Portals into a reversed other world; a kind of fractured looking glass. You can experience these works as an environmental message, a kind of photographic drawing or just meditations on a meandering river.
I've always worked with mining the territory in between drawing and photography. I have over the years repeatedly worked with the idea of the viewer changing their perception the closer they get to my images. ( In the early work the closer you got the more the image fell apart. See the museum exhibition essay "A Kind of Visual Trap" here on my website) From a distance River #1 reads a bit like a cloud reflection, but as you get closer the visual codes change to black ink-like Sumi gestures and barren burned out trees. The Cloud can now read as smoke from the burning world. This duality of line and photographic subject is one of the mysterious things photography can achieve which (for me) no other art form can match. In some of these works the river reflections are acting as a type of "Looking Glass" into our planet's possible future.
My photography process is an act of mediation through deep and extended attention and has evolved over time into capturing or rendering different Infinite Systems (starting with the Infinities) that exists right in front of us. I am trying to understand and present the world in its totality. If only we had the means to observe the world as it truly exists think of how differently we would treat each other and our planet…
With the Halos Series I am literally breaking down the interactions of forest plants and trees with the building blocks of Light. Consider that If only we could see we are engulfed in rainbows and starlight how would that might change humanity? For me these images are literally like stumbling across the footsteps of God. In a way I am not just talking about physical and spiritual Light in many of my works but the idea of Illumination and true Seeing.