Still Life Tableaus: 2008-2019
Archival Inkjet Prints
My photographic still lifes reflect my distress at the depiction of endangered species in the media. They also encompass my attraction to the imagination embodied in student ceramics projects, the rich tradition of still life painting and the material process of constructing outdoor tableaus. In the end, I speak with and through these various elements to invest them with new meaning and resonance and to stimulate pleasure, imagination and thought.
The outdoor tableaus I set up use a hybrid visual language that combines objects, images and materials that are often overlooked, undervalued, discarded. This process mirrors the accumulation of associations that are part of life, but with an emphasis on re-seeing what is frequently ignored. The photograph is important because of its central position in contemporary visual culture and the enormous impact it has on our point of view.
I shoot film to produce digital prints documenting these 3-D arrangements I construct outdoors. This hybrid process makes it difficult to tell whether the final print is a digital composite, a traditional collage, or a photographic document. When viewers realize they’re looking at an un-manipulated photograph, they come to understand that making these kinds of distinctions affects not only how they interpret this particular picture, but also, any photograph.
