Breaking Ground 2011 - 2014

Breaking Ground explores man’s first actions and interactions with landscape. A shovel is forced into ground. We lift earth skyward. We turn solid into void into solid. The sculpture and photo-based images in this exhibition define these First Acts.

My works take you on a journey through an invented history of architecture and civilization. They help you see the non visible, to hover somewhere between the distant and the intimate, to question drawing and photography and to see the ancient in the contemporary. I want to make the physical into a transcendent experience.

This work is titled Sheathing the Rift. All of these images originate as a landscape sculpted from plaster and white museum board. The plaster, the chisel, the scrapers and the files become my “actual” soil, shovel and rake. The camera allows me to enter the lens is my eyes. The photo captures a memory. It’s Photo-shopped, printed in twelve parts, tiled together by aligning registration marks, glued to a wood panel creating one surface. Graphite and colored pencils re-touch, highlight and re-shade. Matt medium is applied and a final coat of Carnauba wax is buffed. My images are constructed like a builder constructs a building.

The seeds for this exhibition originated during my fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 2005, where I chanced upon On the Art of Building in Ten Books by Leon Battista Alberti. This Renaissance primer on architecture inspired my    works in Breaking Ground. They take us back to first shelters, basic principles and simple acts in and on the land.

With this work titled Landscape: Excavation and Repair, a simple rectangular hole is excavated into the earth. The edge broken away is reinforced with plywood and two by four’s. We feel the weight of the earth pushing against the buttressed wall. We are drawn into the hole.