Ill Winds and Sour Waters

My work functions as a signifier for the physical vulnerability we are experiencing in this age of the new millennium. "Ill Winds and Sour Waters" examines the hypothetical boundaries where city and rural landscapes meet and the dangers inherent in the melding of these two worlds.

One opens the newspaper to find experts voicing their concerns over the consumption of genetically modified foods; our President holds a news conference to congratulate those on the cusp of mapping the human genome; daily we are being introduced to new products that help up lead more anti-bacterial lives. Though there may be no Y2K post-apocalyptic vision within our immediate sight, my photographs depict a slower, more insidious landscape of quiet turmoil.

Accidentally Kansas

My town was too small to have a name; I grew up surrounded by the wheat fields of northwestern Kansas. I have been in tornadoes, blizzards and floods. As a girl growing up surrounded by what seemed to be the large expanse of an uncaring Nature, I witnessed some strange and gruesome animal fatalities. I remember a pond that had frozen over very early in the season, trapping thousands of frogs in the ice. I chipped them out and threw them at my sister.

I love disaster movies. The wealthy people who had to come to terms with the mean and nasty elements in 1970’s flicks like The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, and The Poseidon Adventure always seemed especially funny. With my adrenaline rushing, I expected to be thrilled and titillated by these filmed disaster epics and their impending doom. But in my firsthand experience of natural disasters everything slows down. I’m left feeling detached, except for an odd sense of humor in it all. People rarely populate my work.

The photograph unavoidably captures the "during" of any moment, elevating its status to the definitive moment. My work, instead, is more ordinary than that. I am interested in what might even be considered the banality of terror found in the minutes before and after an event.

Of course photography is not merely a naive mechanical device recording unfiltered truth; it’s just another way to embellish the truth. I have always used the camera as a deceitful tool to construct personal lies and stories, hoping to trick the viewer for a moment or two. In "Accidentally Kansas" I offer viewers the terror of the terrain -- found not in the image itself, but in their own imaginations. Through the mind’s own processes of massification my Dixie Cup sized pieces of wood and miniatures become large and looming, such as a nuclear reactor meltdown, even if it’s just for a couple of seconds.

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