Buried
32 x 40 in. archival pigment prints, 2019-ongoing
Geologic time is an epic and confounding concept; an ancient narrative of the Earth’s birth and evolution that is difficult to grasp. Looking at a photograph of the landscape, one can attempt to “read” this story of formation and development, though always at the mercy of technology and artifice. The photograph suspends the forward motion of time, allowing us to examine the surface of the world more closely. However, a photograph is always a tenuous and slippery record. As a flat, subjective, representation of a sliver of time, the photograph’s connection to the actual thing is distant and artificial.
In Buried, I literally bury large format negatives of the epic Western landscape in my own backyard. The resulting negatives contain a dueling interpretation of time. The depiction of a grand landscape, shaped and formed through millions of years of evolution, is clouded, cluttered and contaminated through the direct and literal scarring of Earth’s natural processes. These experimental images collapse and muddle the distance between the representation and the real, here and there, the known and unknown. By obscuring the image, the land becomes a distant abstraction. Like a mirage, the scene appears and fades, an illusion that suggests an impending erasure.
