Lineations
“Everything is about two things coming together.”
–Ann Hamilton
STATEMENT
We encounter our environments at once, with the capacity to remember just fragments. Hence, perception is a composite of smaller, more fleeting moments. If carefully these moments can be arranged, and contemplated at leisure, the beautiful, and sublime enormity of the world around us will unfold.
Lineations represents the culmination of more than 25 years’ worth of looking and working in a method that combines straight and altered photography, transparent layers of vellum, and hand-drawn elements of carefully variegated line weight. Through this process, I bring all materials into a balance where no medium outweighs the other. Vellum acts as a mixer of color, much like a filter might work on a lens. Spindly green vines captured photographically echo the spindly, meandering lines of graphite rendered manually. The haptic and the visual elements combine into a compositional whole that encourages conceptual investigation.
As I hold my camera, I strive to find ways to bring the architectonic into dialogue with nature and as I arrange my photographic and hand-made elements in the studio, I do so with a mind to expose the act of perception itself. In many works here, a viewer can easily recognize the shapes of trees and flowers, sky and sun, yet they are never quite sure of what they see. This lack of grounding is the experienced world, where routine activity affirms a viewer’s sense of perception. In LC18_248, ripped areas of paper create a visual “stop” to the photographic illusion of a mass of vegetation while alluding to the fibers of the plants themselves. In LS17_222, a row of flowering shrubs is visible only as shadows, attesting to their solid presence outside the frame (much, perhaps, like our own).
These vegetal images exist between the space of the man-made and nature—they cast their shadows onto geometric planes, sprout up and live in the crevices between walls and fences, and crawl over rectangular elements with impunity. I extend their world with my pencil, connecting it with my own.
