TURF Exhibition at DVC Art Gallery    October 2011

I've been invited by sculptor Hopi Breton to be part of TURF: Ecological Art and Activism. She is showing two of my Roots photographs with an older video sculpture, Returning. Returning is really about a dislocation, a disruption of our assumptions about nature. I'm really excited about combination of these different works. I think they'll both inform and expand each other. The exhibition is from October 31 to December 1. There's an opening reception on November 3, 6 - 9PM at Diablo Valley College Art Gallery.

Bolinas Museum Exhibition Opens Saturday    June 2011

I just spent a day transporting work and then working out the layout with curator/director Lucy Van Sands Seeburg. The show looks great, and includes several brand new pieces that I'm really excited about. Hope to see you at the opening on Saturday, 3 ﾐ 5 PM!

Titles, Titles, Titles    May 2011

I've got a couple of shows coming up, so in the midst of everything else, I've got to title a number of new works. I've tried so many approaches to titling. One piece early on was called Untitled, but in the end I felt that wasn't a useful response to the world's need for a title. More than anything, I think a title just needs to be a handle, some way a viewer can pick up/out a piece of work and carry it out with them. Maybe it can be a little stepping stool for looking at the piece; it gives you a place from which to look at a piece of art. A title shouldn't get in the way of my photographs, and it's never going to really change the photograph.

The hardest works I've titled are from the Roots and Shrubs series. I was thinking a lot about Greek mythology at the time, and how so many characters in those stories seem to embody aspects of both the mortal and the immortal simultaneously. All of these roots and shrubs were technically dead, but still living through their presence and my imagination. The root ball compositions easily lent themselves to using names from myths. The shrubs, however, really risked becoming totally anthropomorphized by a mythical name. In the end, I chose a generic system of naming, allowing the individual characteristics of each shrub to exist on its own terms.

Studio Update    April 2011

Two exhibitions coming up so I'm working like the proverbial dog. We're tuning up several new works from the Roots and Shrubs series, as well as making the first suite of pieces in the series, Mossworks. These new photographs utilize an approach reminiscent of NextNature, but focusing on a single material, a moss collected in the Sierra. Lots of brilliant green, a color I don't usually get to emphasize.

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Art and Work    March 2011

Sometimes people ask me how the work is made; sometimes they don't. Either way, it seems that people are surprised about how much work goes into these images and how messy it can be.

In trying to create a kind of purity in the visual experience of a photograph, I am wrestling with all of the medium's limitations. Hiding the transformation from the 'real' subject matter to the photograph also hides all the messy bits and pieces that get us there. Have a look:

This quick layout shows the seven different photographs that are being used to make Arch, which will be 96" long when finished. Between the distortion of lenses, limitations in focusing and my need for ultra high resolution, putting all these parts together will take a ton of time. All of which will be completely hidden and, hopefully, not on your mind when experiencing the final image. You can see for yourself this June at my Bolinas Museum exhibition!