Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Untitled #47, 2006

Untitled #43, 2006

Untitled #48, 2006

Untitled #51, 2006

Untitled #46, 2006

Untitled #45, 2006

Untitled #44, 2006

Untitled #50, 2006

Saturday, December 02, 2006

July 2006 India




Today marked the end of a sand mandala creation at the local temple. It’s an all day event. Buddhist celebrations are very welcoming as every person is given a cup of butter tea and rice during the ritual. We found ourselves sitting with the elderly devotees who welcomed us and gave us shelter from the rain. Ritual is so much a part of Tibetan Buddhist tradition that reminds me of some of the rituals in the Catholic Church. Many beautiful objects surround the ceremony.

Leh is the capitol of Ladakh which hosts many tourists for the summer and basically folds up for the winter. The climate is harsh-its taken me 3 days to adjust to 11,000 feet elevation and the sun has been out in the day but now it’s freezing-- I have every layer of clothing on that I packed. We drove out a few hours to a monastery and the landscape is so dry and extreme. The mountains are brown with moonscape like vistas around every turn. Though we are at the top of the world it makes more sense to think of it as the bottom of the sea.

The Gospel Singer


Harry Crews said, “Nothing in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.”

And he said, “ Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about...It takes courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause- to look at them and make something of them.”

The Stones Cry Out



"The tiny pebble that you might happen to pick up during a walk is a cross-section of a drama that began some five billion years ago, in a place that would later come to be called the solar system-a cloud of gas drifting idly through space, growing denser and denser until after countless eons it finally gave birth to this planet. That pebble is a condensed history of the universe that keeps the eternal cycle of matter locked in its ephemeral form."
-Hokaru Okuizuni

2003 Explorong China


Contemplation about one's relationship to the natural landscape is inherent in Taoist philosophy. The Master of Nets Gardens in Suzhou reflects this philosophy by transforming a small space to mimic the experience of the larger world. There is meticulous attention given to nature and how one would experience the garden during a particular season. The scholar rocks and dream stones are evidence of natural abstractions that reflect the larger landscape.

Ancient Ruins

I am interested in culture and history but one that is not written in text books. Ideas that relate to time, transformation, and natural phenomena surround my work. I create ancient ruins of my imagination where I classify and isolate a specific space or object. My camera becomes a dissection and sifting away tool where I hope to reveal a visual mystery.

2001

"Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are."
- Jose Ortega y Gassett

My recent black and white photographs examine the landscape but not in the traditional sense. Rather than being timely located in the world, the surfaces within these images suggest multiple associations. The photographs simultaneously, look like fragments of topographical maps or slides from the microscope of a biologist. Distinctions between the exterior environment and the domain of the interior body seem to evaporate. In a sense the landscape in this work does not "tell us who we are" but rather asks us who we are. These imaginary landscapes prompt the viewer to re-evaluate their relationship to reality.

November 2000

More questions that answers arise as I photograph, about the source of energy that creates a devasting landscape that is so foreign yet familiar. I discover the battleground of opposing forces in nature where what survives are remnants of this confrontation. Something new is found from the ashes left behind. It is a phenomena where the natural world collides with itself as well as the humanmade environment. There does not exist in this place, a distinction between, the beginning of the interior body and the end of the exterior environment.

Please take off your shoes.

It was the first thing I noticed on the door of her studio. Her philosophy is from another age, when the pace of life was purposeful, and one could be conscious of how light describes the world. She asks me to look at the world by listening to the things that speak to me. She calls herself " a gardner not a teacher-cultivating, nourshing the soil, providing the best climate for growth." This way of life made a profound impression on me. I left her studio that day, but I do not think I ever really put my shoes back on for I still feel the earth beneath my feet. Ruth Bernhard, a photographer, brought me the gift of awareness.

Vision

Fall 1997
Photography validates the presence of a mystery I feel in my life. I approach the world and its relationships in nature such as light and darkness from the perspective of seeing something not normally seen. There is a dynamic I observe when I photograph that is difficult to describe but so important to recognize. Recognition of my visual experience of so much more than just that, and my camera has given voice to what I hear.

Friday, March 17, 2006

LP Studio Presentation