Applesauce is an exploration of incongruous environmental relationships where disparate episodes are stripped of their context and mashed together. The photographs are sequenced to allude to tangible relationships between outwardly antithetic events.
My subjects are routinely discovered in landscapes as run-of-the-mill as a Red Delicious or Granny Smith, but they operate as visual ingredients for something that is, hopefully, sweeter and more rewarding than a lone waxed fruit.
I am intrigued by the tradition of using nature as decoration and how that tradition pervades through countless perversions. Flora is an attempt to highlight my aversion to thoughtless conventions, and, more specifically, to enjoy the irony of our relationship with the vegetable world.
The photographs of the virgin western frontier made by Carleton Watkins, Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson, in the late 19th century, are among the most striking images I have ever seen. I am envious of the experience, which I imagine entirely pleasurable, of pointing a camera at an area so wild and untamed that it seems a necessity to record its likeness.
While photographically marauding the contemporary landscape for scenery as magnificent as O'Sullivan's and Watkins' elephantine discoveries, I have become preoccupied with an ever-present and unintentional form of land art: Pile.
I appreciate the organic beauty of these incidental earthworks and I attempt to photograph them accordingly. My goal is twofold: to document the sculptural byproducts of anonymous industrial artists and to make awe filled images of the contemporary landscape in the tradition of the western survey photographers whom I greatly admire.