Conversations with History
I
was born in Yuma Arizona in 1980. By the time I was an adult the Arizona desert
was far from that once documented by Timothy O’Sullivan. Never have I known
this landscape without roads, homes, buildings or urban sprawl. This notion of
land untouched by the hand of man is so foreign it might as well be
make-believe. As long as people have been in the American West, we have found
its barren desert landscapes to be an environment perfect for dumping and
forgetting.
The
deserts of the West also have special significance in the history of
photography. I have explored this landscape with an awareness of the
photographers who have come before me, and this awareness has led me to pay
close attention to the traces left behind by others. For this body of work, I
collect discarded cans from the desert floor, some over four decades old, which
have earned a deep reddish-brown, rusty patina. This patina is the evidence of
light and time, the two main components inherent in the very nature of
photography. I use these objects to speak of human involvement with this
landscape and create images on their surfaces through a labor-intensive 19th
century photographic process known as wet-plate collodion. The result is an
object that has history as an artifact and an image that ties it to its
location. These cans are the relics of the advancement of our culture, and
become sculptural support to what they have witnessed.
Sa
aveti pofta de cultura!
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