Environmental Melancholia - Statement
"Environmental Melancholia: Postcards from the Past.30"
Pigment print on Moab Entrada Rag Natural 300 paper, rice paper, archival photo corners
Unique; Three editions available
Environmental Melancholia
Environmental Melancholia is an ongoing series of imaginary portraits of landscapes physically constructed from overlaid photos of places, often far from each other across the globe. Traditional landscape photographs are transformed in form and content and suggest the interconnectedness of place. Inspired by the seductive beauty of the Hudson River School painters, the images are, at first glance, pictorial and idyllic. However, I disrupt - through color shifts, rips, attaching and connecting photographic components with washi tape and photo corners - the expectation of landscape as continuing “as usual” to interrupt complacency. I want viewers to look beyond the beauty and stop and say, “wait, what is happening here?”
The earth is falling apart as we lose fertile land, animals, birds, rivers, trees, and glaciers. I try to keep things from getting lost. I rip natural resources from one location and tape them to another - to repair the damage, restore the losses, and put the land back together.
I look back from an environmentally-depleted future to the past when the earth thrived. Photographs of flourishing environments, printed separately on rice paper, are physically layered on top of landscapes in peril and held with photo corners. These postcards from the past reference souvenirs gathered in a scrapbook – our natural world reduced to only nostalgic remembrance.