My work investigates the evolving relationship between humans and the landscape. We live in an era of shifting cultural consciousness regarding the place and power of humans in the world. This conceptual shift affects us spiritually, socially, and economically. This relational evolution is a central theme in my latest work. Informed by air travel, virtual travel over the Internet, maps, modeling and real-world experience, our notion of the landscape is collapsed, our sense of scale altered. In my paintings and through my research I re-consider specific landscapes as models, easily controlled and toyed with.

The subject matter of this current body of work is surface mining. Mines serve as a visual metaphor for our simultaneous ownership over and dependence on the land. The function of these landscapes is twofold: they exist both as sites of commodified nature and as the beautiful archeological relics they will become. The pre-existing topography of the land dictates a direction to the extraction process. The tracks left by the absent figure in pursuit of power and progress reveal the elegant geometry unique to our species. The resultant landscape is a meeting of the slow accumulation of matter over millenia, and the precise, efficient excavation by man-made machines.

The paintings are constructed by referencing both the organic and geometric elements contained in the landscapes themselves. The paint-handling varies to mimic my conceptions of the organic as loose or rough, slowly built and heavily layered; the man-made as neat and tight, thin, clean and rigid. Within the space of the paintings our varied, and at times contradictory relationships to the land are revealed. The various textures and approaches to illusion and design allude to our multiple conceptions of our place in the world.

Travel has become critical to the development of my work, as it has made me indelibly aware of the impact of these mining operations. I’ve traveled directly to mountain-top-removal coalmines in West Virginia and copper mines in Arizona to develop this body of work and witness the physical characteristics of these sites. The physical scale of the mines and speed with which they have been formed is hard to comprehend short of visits to the places. An awareness of mining operations and the communities they both sustain and is critical to a forming a more complete understanding of the subject.

Readings such as David Harvey’s From Space to Place and Back Again, Edward S. Casey’s Representing Place: Landscape Paintings and Maps, and Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, have peaked an interest in how my project figures into the epistemology of both environmentalism and art history. The aesthetic and political concerns of this topic prove to complicate and further inspire my process. It is with heightened interest that I take on this subject matter and follow in line with a new perspective on the theme of landscape painting and earthworks.