I’ve spent the majority of my life in the theater of the American Southwest. I’ve played, worked, loved, and idled on its backroads, boom towns, and primitive areas. I was first captivated by the wealth of geological wonders that constitute the Colorado Plateau, but that gave way to a deeper, richer, cultural and spiritual exploration centered around ancient American cosmologies and epistemologies.
As an educator, I live by the semester system. And once the grades are in and the work done – for a hot minute, at least – I head from my familiar home-base in Boulder, CO west or south. Sometimes both.
I go out there to go in here.
I go out there to let go. To get outside of myself.
This is the truest and most authentic artistic process I have. The interplay, or tension, between control and release. Being in that unknown produces a rhizomatic reaction that, like a red line running through the history of my art, is readily apparent.
This ongoing series is one of the key outputs of my time in the region. The work oscillates between abstract and representational iconography (e.g. horses, hoodoos, & wild impartial skies), all the while relying on the southwest to provide the conditions to project and interpret the above themes.
More than a visual or poetic curiosity into the American Southwest, The Garden, is a lens-based essay on letting go.
