Worlds Within Worlds
In the New York City subway system, there is a special station where you can write your hopes, dreams and wishes onto the color confetti that rains down on celebratory crowds during the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square. When the confetti falls, it is a sublime moment of beauty and awe, and I always wonder if the participants know that the dreams of others are falling into their upstretched arms. Inevitably, the following day, these same colorful scraps of paper are swept up and taken to the landfill, or perhaps, recycled. The dissonance in this has long fascinated me: today’s dreams, tomorrow’s trash.
During the COVID19 lockdown, a disaster of epic proportions, I was unable to travel. Travel has been a key part of my creative process for over a decade; new landscapes, changing light, and experiences in new spaces fuels my work as I attempt, always, to capture the ineffable. Confined to my home, I extended my range, looking out into the larger world, using a spotting scope to escape the confines of my yard. The scope acted like a filter: a small, long tunnel, narrowing my vision to precise pinpoints in the surrounding landscape. The scope led me to think about filters, so I started making my own using a variety of objects combined with reflective confetti. Using a variety of cameras to shoot images through these custom filters, I was able expand the landscape, distorting, fracturing and refracting, opening up new vistas swimming in color and light. Both fact and fiction, these invented landscapes are introspective musings on what it means to live in a broken world.