A Wilderness comes out of two separate revelations I had about photography and the world. The first was that my prior photographic work was driven by looking for a particular conception of nature in the world, one deeply influenced by other artistic representations of nature. The second was that I could turn that same form of looking at things I wouldn’t have even considered as possible photographic subjects, including things we might normally consider very far from nature.
These realizations gave me a creative space where I could explore how nature, technology, and self interacted, and ultimately chart new ways of standing in relation to all three. The images in A Wilderness reflect this, drawing from a range of photographic techniques including self-portraiture, physically manipulated prints, photogrammetry, and virtual photography. These techniques blur the distinction between real and unreal to create a space of potentialities where the world can be re-authored.
Our world is in dire need of such re-authoring. We live in a time of irruptions - the pandemic, global warming, AI - and all the old maps delineating and subordinating nature and technology to our will have degraded. We are off into the territory of dragons, and it is time to see what is breathing here beyond the map.