Prairie, Remembered
In an essay from 1976, pioneering land artist Robert Smithson wrote, “We cannot take a one-sided view of the landscape.” He argued that a particular place, “cannot be seen as a ‘thing in itself’, but rather a process of ongoing relationships existing on a physical region.”
This attitude is a driving force behind my art practice. Works are visual products of a sustained drawing process, born of my ongoing relationship with the prairie. Working from memories of moments and experiences, I build up marks that reference both visual forms and non-visual characteristics like movement and time. I resist characteristics of traditional landscape representation by both the obscuring of obvious points of orientation such as a horizon, and by seeking a different kind of source material: Imagery in my work develops from a montage of moments distilled by memory and perception, not from a single scene bounded by a frame.
Without a single source, these works become freed from time and site. I think of them as fragments of a larger, continuous whole that I am still discovering and learning from.