ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

The Water Lens series draws attention to mediation, setting up a dialogue between a subject and its representation. A bowl of water acts as both the physical and metaphoric lens that considers water concerns in arid environments. Image place names provide information regarding each contextual environment. Some lenses celebrate the architecture of water—land that has been profoundly shaped by the presence and absence of water. Pictured at left are the colorful, ancient striped soils of the Painted Desert deposited when this site was a vegetated floodplain. The dunes of White Sands National Monument, composed of a salt mineral that crystallizes during evaporation, are likewise evidence of radical, if epic, climate change. Some images feature sites chosen for their contemporary resource concerns and are necessarily political lenses. A water slide on a houseboat welcome center in Page, AZ ironically promises a slide into dusty sagebrush with dam power lines in the background. Others lenses show a place where golf course turf meets indigenous Sonoran Desert species, and a palace of fountains choreographed to music for the entertainment of desert tourists.

I choose to use a cheap, flawed glass bowl for its emphasis on distortion as subject becomes image. In the detail above, an imperfection in the glass multiplies and inverts a shadow of myself pulling a dark slide from the camera. I’m interested in the way that our subjectivity as observers makes every act of looking an act of representation. The etymology of the word landscape means both land and “composition”. When we look, we compose. Making a picture of land, is thus a recognition of that landscape we’ve already made perceptually. In the Water Lens series, water refracts light inverting the landscape.  The pictures are reminders that all images entering both the human eye and the camera enter upside down and are reinterpreted by mind or mirror, respectively. This inversion in the mind’s eye implies that no image is objective. Every image seen is a creative act subject to interpretation within our value-laden, water-filled bodies. The lenses imply that “inside” and “outside” are in dialogue, not dichotomy.