My prints, sculptures, and videos are reflections upon the persistent appeal of bucolic nature imagery amidst the 21st century shift from physical media to digital media in industrialized society. These works unmask the facsimile, the artificial, the dream-image of Nature that exists as Other, particularly within American culture. Nature as a concept is, according to the Oxford Dictionary, “opposed to humans or human creations,” and this definition of Nature-as-a-world-apart is implicit in much of the Western canon of art and media. The stories we tell about Nature augment our perception of the world around us. In the context of the Anthropocene, I feel an uneasiness regarding depictions of Nature within capitalist society due to the growing realization that our worldviews regarding the biosphere have not served us well. Climate change due to industrial resource use has altered our relationship to our environment, and the emergence of the digital has altered our relationship to physical objects. My artworks explore the shift from the physical pastoral to the digital pastoral, focusing on the increasingly more tenuous relationship between Nature-inspired imagery and the original ecological phenomena it references.
The prints themselves are loud, cloying, and hallucinatory. Reinterpretations of botanicals and landscapes are altered and distorted to the point of parody, clamoring with a cacophony of Nature that verges on oversaturated kitsch. Hudson River School paintings and Dutch Golden Age still lifes are reconfigured and infused with a strange pop-art sensibility reminiscent of Lisa Frank, plastic houseplants, Instagram filters, and AI text-to-image generators. Dripping with saccharine superficiality, kitsch imagery echoes pre-existing tropes without apology. If Nature relies on a false duality, any successful attempt to present a “true” depiction of our environment would need to include every kind of matter, from snails to sidewalks to HDTVs, and would dissolve its own meaning in attempting to describe all of reality. Thus, the only way I am confident in my ability to discuss Nature without hypocrisy is through romantic irony: an awareness that my depictions of Nature are unconvincing. By parodying what is already embedded in consumerist culture, I emphasize its artificiality.
My studio practice oscillates between digital and physical, and I am interested in how my explorations function as a collaboration among myself, the historical artist whose work I reference, the computer interface, and the printing press. Each actor adds its own mark-making quality to the final image, and each translation represents a new layer of distance between the viewer and the original subject. The indirectness of the viewer’s experience of the landscapes reflects the surreal quality of consumer distance from the raw materials used in industrial production. It also functions as a meditation upon how virtual experience via digital devices offers a mediated reality rather than a true representation of lived encounters with ecological phenomena.
Industrial cultures tend to inscribe Nature imagery with connotations such as authenticity, purity, and majesty. The ‘untouched wilderness’ of our collective consciousness provides respite from the rigidity of the built environment. A connection to nature offsets the stresses of the modern workplace, and in the case of nature-lovers and environmentalists, it mediates our guilt over participating in a society that uses natural resources unsustainably. However, by fetishizing flora and fauna, we exclude ourselves from any definition of nature and it becomes more difficult to design human systems that function effectively within our environment. My work encourages viewers to pay attention to our conflicting definitions of Nature. This investigation becomes all the more pressing with the knowledge that industrial activity has now irrevocably transformed our environment, and “Nature” as we know it is changing. Representations of Nature, from the literary to the digital image, become memorials to former systems.