Statement +
Transcriptions is a continuation of Transcriptions: Indices from the Earth. It uses integral features of the photographic medium to reframe the systems we use to know the earth. In a search for rootedness, Transcriptions engages directly with various environments by bringing light-sensitive materials into immediate contact with nature, physically touching paper to soil, water, or plant material. This work situates the return to camera-less imagery, a current trend in contemporary art, as a valuable way to connect a photograph’s meaning and appearance with its technique and subject matter. The resulting camera-less lumen prints are passageways through which the transcriptions are carried across; they are evidence of a vision beyond what the eye can see.
Transcriptions makes tangible artifacts of a silent experience. The images in this body of work are mediations and meditations on the land, registered through physical means. Sometimes, prints are superimposed into images of the landscape in which they were created as a means to ground them within their origin. Other times the camera-less images are left without an anchor to examine the material and imaginative basis of photographic experience. Here, images created in and of the landscape offer a raw, primal, and rooted aesthetic experience of place. They set up a world to create occasions for the recognition of beauty. Transcriptions asks the viewer to consider what can be learned from the world through direct physical contact with it, and what such a connection with the world may reveal about ourselves.
