Statement

 Growing up in Southern California’s urban sprawl, I had no direct experience with the natural landscape until I was old enough to drive beyond the city. I discovered the indigenous oaks and sycamores, the foothills and grasslands, and the lesser-known wildernesses.
 

     My tools range from an iPhone to medium and large format film cameras. Through image-making I investigate the intersection of modern phenomenological philosophies, postmodern photographic ontologies, local histories, and reflections on place and placelessness.
 

     Visually, these intersections are manifest in the simultaneous layering and breaking through of paint into the photographs. The visual dislocation between “precise” mechanized recording and messy human gestures is an echo of tensions between our ideas of frontier and wilderness, between beauty and fear, projecting their psychological dramas within the viewer. Their reactions reach across the spectrum from feelings of comfort and rest to foreboding and uneasiness