Background

"To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle." - Walt Whitman

Our planet is in the midst of an unprecedented ecological transition. It goes by various names: climate change, mass extinction, the Anthropocene. As an artist who makes landscape pictures, I am struck by the fact that even the most carefully protected wilderness areas will, over the coming decades, be radically transformed. What will our few remaining wild places look and sound like a century from now? It was with this question in mind that I set out to make a series of archival landscape recordings that capture the preciousness and fragile beauty of nature on the brink and, equally important, preserve for future generations a kind of wilderness experience that is itself endangered.

The first film in the series, New Nature, Balsam Lake Mountain Wild Forest, Ulster County, New York, October 15, 2016  has been exhibited widely and was acquired by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, ensuring its long-term preservation. I hope to place future recordings in other museum collections, to exhibit them in art spaces, and also to present them in nature centers, hospitals and other venues where they might reach broader audiences.

In this work, I am interested in the traditions of Western landscape painting and photography, and how they reflect our changing ideas about the natural world. If, for example, we understand the paintings of the Hudson River School and the frontier photographs of Carlton Watkins and his peers as expressions of manifest destiny, what kinds of landscape images might flow from the ideology of environmentalism in an age of climate change and mass extinction, as we come to realize that even the wildest places are being transformed by human impact?