Place(lessness) and Long Way Home express the dichotomy between inside & outside. In these separate but related bodies of work, I utilize the landscape and ephemeral moments, as well as video and photographs of various sizes, to weave together a tapestry that is redolent with melancholia and muddled beauty.
Place(lessness) shows the result of my desire to, in the lyrical words of Tom Waits, “trade it all for the highway instead.” Wherever my meanderings take me, I’m always seeking that rare and precious sense of place and elusive feeling of freedom that I find so easily in Montana. Growing up surrounded by such expansive landscapes has led me to feel not quite right (and rather claustrophobic at times) when that extent of space is no longer at hand. These exterior photographs in Place(lessness) are about absence and loss to me - loss of innocence, self, physical space, and sense of place.
Long Way Home is the other side of the coin — a desire to set down an anchor and create roots in a place; creating a home away from home through these interior photographs. In these photographs, windows are a source of much needed natural light and act as much as a lifeline as a barrier to the outdoors. There is always the temptation of the outdoors in these images - the desire to leave this “safe place” and head off on an adventure through the windows into the unknown outside.