Artist Feature

Every week an artist is featured whose single image was published by Der Greif. The Feature shows the image in the original context of the series.

I am invested in how a single image can move the viewer to a memory of his/her own –how the familiarity of the photographed can work as a trigger for one’s past and draw it into the present creating a very immediate experience of the passage of time. In noticing those moments I think we can identify our own transcendence – we can simultaneously have one foot in one previous life and another foot in the present one. I choose to use photographs to explore the person as landscape, and landscape as visage, holding histories as complex and unique as the experiences of any one individual, holding layers of years and weather gone-by. The series entitled As if it should have been a quarry and named for the American poet Robert Frost’s 1954 poem “Directive”, was shot this past year in Iceland –a country in the middle of the Atlantic ocean positioned directly above a continental divide, making it the site of frequent seismic and volcanic activity. Inspired by the story of a small village there whose inhabitants dug themselves out of the ash of a volcano that erupted without warning one January morning in 1973, this body of work seeks to investigate the way in which one reconciles oneself to impermanence through living with a continuity that suggests the infinite, and how a piece of land can be a reflection of one’s countenance and vice versa, like maps in conversational flux with one another. Through considering the passage of time in its relation to both physical and emotional space is to allow for an innate metaphysical inquiry to be explored—that of our own vulnerability and survival as possibly found in the landscapes that grow us into being.