Manifest Destiny and the Digital Frontier
Whether through the vernacular of painting or interdisciplinary forms such as sculpture, video and installation, my work has often expressed a reverence for the landscape and a desire to understand its influence on us, as well as our influence on it. Recently, I have been specifically focused on exploring the ways that technology can both reveal and obscure the world. Satellite surveillance technology, for example, has made the landscape evermore accessible, evermore detached from direct experience, and evermore loaded with political and existential baggage. Increasingly, I find myself working in the interstices between computer and human capabilities.
My search for unspoiled elements of the sublime has taken me continually further afield. In current projects, I use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology and terrain generating software to create comprehensive, stunningly photo-realistic, virtual worlds. With the use of elevation data and the proper detailing, they have all of the geological features and can become virtually indistinguishable from the real place. The technology gives me complete control over these digital landscapes, including the ability to digitally add snow, trees, colors, textures, lighting, and atmospheric conditions in a creative process akin to applying paint to canvas.
Playing creator, explorer, and documenter of these terrains, I have used them to suggest new responses to the landscape with forms ranging from trompe l’oeil realistic photos and animations to painted geometric abstractions and sculptures. Much as Mont Sainte-Victoire was a repeated starting point for Cezanne’s abstract paintings, I am using the iconic form of Mt. Rainier as a point of reference for many of these digital explorations. Thrice removed from reality, they point to the values of traditional, sublime Romantic landscape painting and nature photography, while insidiously questioning the nature of our relationship to the location and the efficacy of any vicarious experience of it.