THE WILDERNESS

Photographed in a cavernous, life-size cyclorama in Sweden, using only natural light, the images from The Wilderness series are of an environment where reality is fluid and perceptions are skewed. At first, the photographs evoke 19th century landscape paintings, but as the viewer approaches, the line between photography and painting is blurred, as is the line between what is/was alive and what is artifice. In this, the photographs exemplify a reoccurring theme in my work – that quivering line between what we perceive as real or intuit is artifice.

This is a land of isolation and mystery where the laws of nature have retreated –- the birds have flown away and the animals have disappeared. Waves still crash on the shore, but the sea is a painting and the beach is constructed of rocks with wire armatures. In the forests, dead trees are painted to appear alive and mountains are made of plaster. But sunlight streams over these unnatural surfaces, imbuing them with a veneer of vitality and the possibility of life.

This is a world frozen in time, hauntingly beautiful in its quietude yet unsettling in its confrontation of perceived reality. And at play is the question of whether these images are windows into an imagined past, a simulacrum of the present, or harbinger of the future.