College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Growing up in Southern California’s urban sprawl, I did not experience the natural landscape until I was able to drive. My childhood knowledge of wilderness was informed by television and books.

I gradually realized that the most alluring places were not the romanticized ponderosa-laden vistas in the imagination of my youth. Rather, I was drawn to the indigenous oaks and sycamores of the foothills and grasslands; the lesserknown wildernesses on the fringes of human habitation.

These locations are rarely more than an hour away from where I was raised. I am repeatedly drawn to these areas; to ponder and to document cycles and seasons.

My tools range from digital to large format 4x5 film cameras. One of my favorites is an imprecise eighty-year old Zeiss Ikon Nettar; the “point-and-shoot” of its day. Through my image-making and writing, I investigate the intersection of modern phenomenological philosophies, postmodern photographic ontologies, local histories, and reflections on place.

Visually, these collisions are manifest in the simultaneous layering and breaking through of paint into the photographs. This visual dislocation between “precise” mechanized recording and human gestures is an echo of tension between ideas of frontier and wilderness; between beauty and fear, each projecting their psychological dramas within the viewer.