re-setting places

The scroll-like panoramic dimensions of the images in the series engage the viewer over time as the eye frames and tracks across the them. They form a narrative of how we see and understand place.

The character of grass, stones, and vines are reflected with changing clarities of light and detail as the visibility of the landscape opens and closes with the seasons. The resulting series called re-setting places are close, quiet studies on the nature of vision, memory, and the transience of things.

These images are connected to a long lineage of landscape-based work with Classical Chinese painting’s aesthetics that balance the polarities of near and far and empty and full as essential to a vision of the world, and with how the Japanese garden constructs and re-sets elements poised between the natural and the composed.

The process of adjoining multiple shots to create a singular image has existed since the inception of photography through combination printing and superimposition, and is today aligned with current digital strategies. This approach shares its language with my background in filmmaking—where the interpretation of a space is composed of a series of multiple focal lengths and angles cut together to form a filmic understanding of time and location. Like in a film, the cuts between the images combine to re-set a place and are not apparent. One accepts its language because it speaks to how we experience a place as a montage of views and remembrances.