steel with oxidation, oil & wax finish
7’ x 10’ x 4’ 6”
2005
I remember the wind blowing over the ridge near the trailer where we lived when I was young. The wind blowing across the open topography, rock outcroppings, hollow constructs, and simple structures producing a soft visceral howling; a sound that has always stuck with me. This sound was one of lonesome and unforgettable atmospheric time, of isolated open space – a sound that is intra-reflective. I have tried to remember that sound in this work. I want work that is felt rather than viewed, work that becomes a place within itself.
Cold Springs is a place in time, experienced, built upon, carved by generations. Sediment embedded in the dust, the brush, the antique ground and a sagging corral. A painting of family history, Cold Springs is a place of dissipated human experience. It is a place between space, an openness of range and reservoirs holding water, grass, fences.
The sight is a sandwich of horizons to swallow. Wind creeps along the edges of this horizon, tightly filling the negative space with its breath, hissing seams of dry spit. We live on this bread of land. Anthill space that holds covered secrets of passage to the experienced, an intimate expanse.
Space is mapped, trailed and fenced. Dried up and fought over.
Evidence of all we’ve been given, evidence of all we have taken, earth’s horizon is a window into the darkening human soul. Here, one of the few continental lines that revoke man’s sprawling touch remains. Dangerously close enough to mother us, before we pollute its cyclic being. Humanity’s development breaks and buries links to its own lifecycle, its own food chain outsourced. We fill the powerful openness with subdivided meaninglessness.
I am fueled by encounters with site, space, and time. Encounters become memory. Form is pulled from memory, like memory is pulled from photography. I extrude form from photograph, pulled from a flattened world, representing memory and infinite, spatial and life-filled texture, shape, and elevation. Shadows beneath space become shadows pulled to form. Space that floats, containers of vastness, open to trails of history. Experience is memory’s map, a mapping of a non-site. Like representation on a map, everything in space has a relationship to everything else in space. To understand one part of the relationship is to realize the whole.
