Fire at Sea

Fire at Sea references the Turner painting of a ship ablaze. The project documents a flatscreen being blasted with a hose. The explosive apocalypse playing out in digital space collides with water that scatters, flows and pools across its physical surface. This turbulent process explores the screen as a planar edge of digital and physical experience and becomes a site of mark making and gestural abstraction. At several points a female figure also emerges, her body tossed violently across the frame both by the pixilated fire and the mercurial effects of refracting water unable to penetrate the virtual space. The imagery tracks a furious failure of the elements to connect in any real material or causal way. The work is presented as a grid of photographs and also as a video projected on a piece of translucent calcite.

In 34.372515, -119.252337, Looking North, a landscape is fractured by tossed shards of broken mirror. The mirror reflects the environment in 360 degrees, inverts the hierarchy of ground to sky plane, and captures a glimpse of the apparatus of the camera, photographer, dog. In lieu of the objectification embedded in a vanishing point, the image compresses and complicates the distance between viewer and viewed.

In the video Idaho, a potato slowly rolls across a horizon line in the California desert. The potato recalls a history of famine, and migratory uproot, through to an apotheosis in unsustainable industrial farming techniques. In the context of a daunting and aridifying landscape, its absurd presence also grimly foreshadows precarity and struggle.