final project: "Cultural Carcasses"

I have always been drawn to discarded or abandoned objects of human creation; decaying country convenient stores, forsaken roadside furniture, crumbling foundations of senescent homes, even vintage soda or beer cans rusting away in a shallow roadside drainage ditch. Within these images of our "cultural carcasses" there is a strong sense of history and antiquity and an incredibly evocative visual metaphor for our own mortality. We, and our creations and endeavors, exist in a very limited temporal scope, one in which oblivion will eventually claim all that we know. Our experiences, achievements, and properties will eventually be cast aside, overlooked, and ultimately forgotten.

While this may seem a bleak and desolate perspective of existence, to me these scenes invoke the opposite emotion. There is something comforting about the knowledge of my own impermanence, a sort of liberation through ephemerality. While i am struck with wonder about the lives these objects or places have lived (who owned them, when and where they were used, where they have been, etc.) i am simultaneously forced to be grateful for the present and reminded that the earth will undoubtedly continue without me.

The images in this series are intended to induce a sense of this ineludible fate. The subject matter is not only deteriorating, but nature is reclaiming it. It is my hope that through this series the viewer will experience a similar sense of suspended self-importance and a connection with the continuity of existence. In time, all we know will fall and from the remnants new life will flourish.

portraits

observations/constructions

24 Hour Diptychs