WESTERN LANDS
Initially, I was interested in photographing in the west out of a longing for the space and solitude that I had grown up with in Central Washington. Desert and farmland blend In a valley called The Roza, situated between the Rattlesnake and the Horse Heaven Hills, which run along either side of the Yakima Valley. This inner imperative stayed with me as I expanded my range, and on one level I was simply measuring my vision of the land against the memories of my childhood. I felt free to roam in the pictures I made, through both place and time.
I was less interested in the genre of conventional landscape photography, and more interested in thinking of the land as a dynamic Visual Theater. I was fascinated by the clash of events that would take place where the road meets the land, the points of rupture where humans meet nature. I was interested in the constant flickering of events that moved through my view as I was driving on both back roads and highways. Drifting was important to me, and I was constantly aware that I could not see what was there, while I was here. Within this fabric of beauty and wildness, disturbances both creative and destructive are on display, many times having ironic consequences. Like language itself, or watching a movie, images and meanings are re-combining constantly. It is within these concerns of mapping out connections within ever changing visual information, that my work in the land held some of the same concerns as the constructed imagery I was pursuing in the studio during these same years.
Reflected in the work also is an attention to the land as body. The way we use and occupy the land, the way a boat cuts through water, a road coursing through a devastated landscape, drainage pipes emerging from the land, a tire stuck in a crevice of rock - all possess an uncanny sense of both the medical and the sexual. I was interested in the wound created within the way that we occupy the land: there is no easy divide between the land and our own image. The flickering back and forth between land and culture typifies the west in a sometimes easy, sometimes uneasy relationship. A leisurely but also disheveled and antagonistic way that we interact with the land was compelling to me.
And then, of course, there is always beauty: impossible to resist.