Familiar landscapes mediated by culture have become a starting point for much of my studio practice; in particular, I am interested in how we inhabit our world and how we manufacture it to fit corporatized molds. While living in my home country, Scotland, I was inspired by the industrial landscape that lived within the picturesque, and I found that my work reflected that environment. This contrast of nature and culture inspired me in those days and still inspires me in Orlando, Florida, where I now reside.

As a conceptually based artist, I move freely between mediums, using painting as my familiar touchstone, yet often incorporating sculpture, video, and photography within my installations.

My recent work deals with ‘Landscape’ as a term, and how it signifies our literal and metaphorical relationship to our habitats: how we organize them, and how we co-exist within them. My spatially illusionistic representations of cairns, in particular, attempt to interpret these relationships. I transform the classical cairn—an assembled mound of gathered grey rocks—into three-dimensional relief paintings via saturated color, forced perspective, and simplified shapes, offering synthesized versions of the original. The works create a spare, simulated landscape where my constructions begin to play with the space of hyper-reality.

Wall – Statement

Wall, 2017, recycled cardboard, gesso and ink, 24′ x 10′

The Wall installation consists of cardboard-cutout drawings made from re-purposed consumer packaging. They create an imposing, looming wall of individual tower/totem-like shapes. When first shown in full, Wall physically barricaded the viewer, forcing them to walk around the whole of its 24 feet in order to enter the exhibition. Labels proclaiming ‘Made with American Pride’ and ‘America at Work’ peek through the whitewashed cardboard and cartoon-like black-line drawing, hinting at the satirical, political undertones of the piece. With each new situation, Wall is re-contextualized, suggesting a shifting border that runs a discourse between consumer-led globalization and our widespread experiences of displacement felt by many during these troubled times of exile, migration, immigration reform, and border control.

In Search of the Spectacular – Statement

In Search of the Spectacular, 2015, Digital archival print

Man’s attempted dominion over nature, in both its obvious and subtle ways, sometimes gives us pause for thought, but especially as we face a sublime vista after the achievement of a summit. Placing a stone on a cairn marks that achievement, but does it not also state a sense of ownership of the view, much in the same way a tourist’s snapshot of the scene would do? The simple placement of another rock on the pile suggests an addition to our conquests, an illusion of control. I was here, man says, as he surveys the view, and digests and tames the wildernesses.

I see these cairns as teetering between the authentic and the commodified, they are both a true monument to landscape, community and individual human accomplishment as they are a contrived frame around a view, transforming the reality into a captured trophy or image. How innocent they look as they are encountered, how inspiring, however, once stripped of the friendly tourist/ blogosphere context, collected, and reframed, we see these [images of] piles of rocks for what they are- a subtle artifice that attempts to displace mother nature and her supremacy, the ego of individualism operating within the group’s aura.

In Search of the Spectacular, began its development while revisiting early conceptual artist’s work such as Bas Jan Ader, Hans Haack, Susan Hiller, Ed Ruscha and Robert Smithson. Their sense of the world, especially Smithson, has an “entropic”, dark humored aesthetic that has also been evident in my own studio practice- one that examines familiar landscapes mediated by culture. I align myself with Smithson when he expressed in A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic – “Actually, the landscape was no landscape”… but “a particular kind of self destroying postcard world of failed immortality and oppressive grandeur”¹

Through my choice of title, I am yet another artist who pays homage to Bas Jan Ader and his artwork ‘In Search of the Miraculous’ that claimed his life in 1975 as he sailed out in his skiff to cross the Atlantic, never to reach the other side. In Search of the Spectacular acts as a repetitive monument, to the artist, to the myth that surrounds him, and to nature’s capability to swallow egos whole, regardless of our attempts to claim its aesthetic.

To further aestheticize my found images of cairns I constructed a few processes, by which I could heighten their design, and create a slick veneer that would unite the images neatly. Drawing inspiration from past touristic posters from the Swiss Alps tourism, International Style era, I enhanced the vibrancy of the color and flattened the sky to a variety of pop infused sky blues. I also gave the cairns themselves a “subtle newsprint grey”² effect to link to the visuals of newspapers, magazines and maps, utilizing society’s replacement of the unique moment, the real and authentic, with perpetual pictures, abstractions and hyper-reality. The co-opting of natural encounters, of the sublime, is no longer only an artist’s pursuit, I am thinking of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, but is also commercialism’s way to de-place and homogenize for its own ease of expansion.

Another element within In Search of the Spectacular, is the one cairn that repeats unlike the others. It is a 1930-1945 postcard image of Thoreau’s cairn³, both the cairn and the postcard are a memorial to the naturalist and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. Admiring pilgrims began the cairn 10 years after his death beside his former home at Walden Pond, where he spent 2 years living outside society to “front only the essential facts of life”⁴. Henry David Thoreau offers a distant, yet clear voice of reason amongst the slick and mesmerizing materialistic world of today. His work, 1862 ‘Walden’, is an ode to the simple life and a way to navigate back to the real individual experience, sans consumer society group think and capitalist hybrid selves. I place his tourist postcard cairn as a regular breather along our path of heady ambitions, while recognizing the contradictions of this image, as it has already been supplied for consumption long ago.

¹⁺² Robert Smithson, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic

^{3 Postcard image, from the collection of Boston Public Library}

^{4 Quote taken from the plaque still seen beside the cairn today.}