This exhibition represents a studio preview of a larger project in progress. The works included here represent summer with a still image, and winter with a video loop. Both pieces require stereoscopic viewing glasses for a 3D effect.

“After Krieghoff” comprises a series of videos and still photographs in four seasons. The photomontage imagery combines my own photographs of landscapes and objects with painted skies appropriated from Krieghoff. The trees portrayed (on Hahnemühle paper) feature a knitted nylon rope touque, red in summer and bleached over the seasons. The animals coming into the video landscape are photographs of plastic toys designed in Germany and made in China.

The series responds to the ambiguity of the photographic record, adjusting the landscape much like Krieghoff did through genre painting. My goal is to ruminate on perceptions of place, on objects subject to change, on rendered reality, notions of veracity, staged moments, authenticity and appropriation, as well as on the ecology of forest management. I intend the imagery to build on the anxieties of romanticism, the effect of industrialization on the natural and social environment, and to resonate with current sentiments at a time of accelerated change to our mode of production. The project furthers my exploration of the intersections between culture and nature, seeking a common visual ground in blurred fields between images borrowed from art history, nature photography, craft and technology.

This project was created with the support of a Mid-Career Grant from the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.