A Giant Thirst (2014-2020)
Skip to Images ↓The exploitation of the West has resulted in an appalling number of dystopian locations. Edward Abbey wrote, "If industrial man continues to multiply his numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making." Such intent resurrects and redefines the notion of Medieval geocentrism: Humans as the center of the universe. But in all maps, geography is situated relative to other geography, sanitizing and obfuscating any geocentric agenda.
Mythography, however, offers locations that are fluid spaces, elegantly reflecting the geocentrism of humanity. These are spaces of compression: slivers between rural and urban, natural and created, synthetic and real. Thus they reveal how humans rewrite environment. Using visual mythography, this series examines and critiques humanity's commitment to a synthetic, geocentric existence; it seeks and makes visible the thin line of demarcation in the West where Abbey’s two worlds meet, when the human conundrum and the natural invert. The synthetic becomes the natural, and the wild becomes subjugated to humanity’s ever-growing hunger for the fabricated and the counterfeit. In giving voice to such phenomena, these photographs impart the imperative need for humanity to understand, accept, and change its manner of coexistence with its environment.
