It was from this site in which nearly all the land west of the original thirteen colonies was organized and compartmentalized into a grid suitable for sale to land prospectors and would-be homesteaders. This site acts as an essential point of reference, a sort of personal datum, from which I gauge how people, including myself, interact with the natural landscape. I have interpreted that this location established a clear and distinct separation between people and the land.

A constant in the work is my exploration of the ways in which a photograph can be expanded and mutate between being journalistic, scientific, artistic and vernacular. In this project I consciously blend color and black and white images of various sizes with other materials to reflect my process of questioning how empiricism, mediation and cognition defines a person’s experiences in the world. I am interested in expanding the viewer’s experience of a photograph and work to reference popular, but not necessarily conscious, perceptions of everyday interactions with nature.

Using the roadside monument site of the “Point of Beginning”, the surrounding vicinity, and a home lighting studio as places not unlike stages I work to reveal, fictionalize and question “nature” as a geographic locale, as a romantic ideal, and as a socio-political construct. In this work I am interested in qualifying my varied experiences in the natural environment as a set of relations between disparate cognitive and sensory events – where perception eclipses the ground underfoot.