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My work is about permanence, change and loss. It is about our futile attempt to stop time, to be still and to hold on to things that can't be kept. The images and references are of subtle, even generic, but emotionally charged places; spaces we might imagine knowing well even if we don't, homes or spots we may have driven by countless times or flown over once in a plane on our way to somewhere else entirely. We look out and imagine what lives have been lived there. The images are familiar and vague at the same time, like fading memories that both comfort us and leave us lonely. After all, the spaces we're intimate with literally ground us on this earth and place us with a sense of stability in a terribly chaotic world. The French philosopher, Bachelard, wrote that "a house is a tool with which to confront the cosmos. It helps us to say, 'I am an inhabitant of this world, in spite of the world.'" And just as a photograph is proof, a house or a road or a telephone pole is also proof; physical proof that we were there. But now we are here, and the image on paper that is a photograph may help us to remember, but it can never bring us back. An attempt to save an experience by photographing the evidence is as futile as trying to stop time. I try to convey that sense of "then and now" with my work. In contrast to the still, solid architecture we build and surround ourselves with, in contrast to the marks we make on the earth in an attempt at control and immortality, and in contrast to the frozen photographs which we treasure although they are simply illusions, our lives are, for better or for worse, in constant and unstoppable forward motion.

To convey the sense of time passing I photograph my images while moving, primarily from a car or a plane. I use an archival inkjet process to print the images on watercolor textured paper. The final prints range in size, but are often quite large (44"x 60" for example), enhancing the painterliness and loss of detail within the soft images.



Lyn Ainsworth | Antonio Carreño | Celeste Fichter | Gregory Forstner | Jason Florio | Jim Knight | Jill Nathanson | Julia Nitsberg | Kerstin Roolfs | Andrea Sanders | Sylvia Schuster | David Stern | Robert Stivers | Phyllis Trout | Paul Vickery


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