If miniature things recede into the past, giant things get closer, become our immediate future. All these unexpected fantasies come gradually into focus from a long distance away or appear delightfully around a curve, like instant postcards come to life. Speed flattens, leaving photos in the mind.1
The notion of the sublime experience in landscape, one often associated with 19th century painting, will never be what it was. With the advent of mass travel (particularly air travel) the romance of the ‘remote’ is harder to come by. This work spawns from an ongoing interest in tourism and the complexity of viewing landscape as visitor. Famous waterfalls, massive canyons, and manicured palacial gardens–sites that have the distinction of being awe-inspiring magnets for tourism– are so thoroughly photographed that we need not physically visit such places to feel, perhaps prematurely, that we understand them. Discussion of travel inevitably leads to discussion of snapshots, souvenirs, but rarely acknowledging the privilege of leisure. The intimate scale of the snapshot or souvenir is often in direct conflict with mainstream tourism and its propensity towards spectacle and gigantism.
My interests reside here, in the intersection of knowledge, scale, and representation.
My practice is inspired by the human pursuit of knowledge in the form of a harnessed natural world. The romance of the exotic and the anticipation of ‘away’ are domains co-habited by the museum/gallery visitor and the traveller. By juxtaposing two representations of landscape, albeit engineered landscape, I hope to examine our peculiar obsession with preservation and dominion.
1 Lucy R. Lippard, On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place. New York: The New Press, 1999. 114
The notion of the sublime experience in landscape, one often associated with 19th century painting, will never be what it was. With the advent of mass travel (particularly air travel) the romance of the ‘remote’ is harder to come by. This work spawns from an ongoing interest in tourism and the complexity of viewing landscape as visitor. Famous waterfalls, massive canyons, and manicured palacial gardens–sites that have the distinction of being awe-inspiring magnets for tourism– are so thoroughly photographed that we need not physically visit such places to feel, perhaps prematurely, that we understand them. Discussion of travel inevitably leads to discussion of snapshots, souvenirs, but rarely acknowledging the privilege of leisure. The intimate scale of the snapshot or souvenir is often in direct conflict with mainstream tourism and its propensity towards spectacle and gigantism.
My interests reside here, in the intersection of knowledge, scale, and representation.
My practice is inspired by the human pursuit of knowledge in the form of a harnessed natural world. The romance of the exotic and the anticipation of ‘away’ are domains co-habited by the museum/gallery visitor and the traveller. By juxtaposing two representations of landscape, albeit engineered landscape, I hope to examine our peculiar obsession with preservation and dominion.
1 Lucy R. Lippard, On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place. New York: The New Press, 1999. 114
