My work is inspired by 19th century Romantic painting of sublime nature and the mythical notion of Arctic Eden, the tropical paradise in the middle of a world of frozen oceans and glaciers. Leftover visual memories stemming from Caspar David Friedrich and John Martin get filtered though stories and pulp fiction from Jules Verne and sci-fi to movies and TV shows like “Lost”.

Islands and the arctic regions are my riffing point. These symbolic places for transformation are disappearing and once again the weather or nature has sublime power in it’s original sense of awesomeness and possible destruction of the viewer.

In the face of an anxiety ridden world of natural and man made disasters, my work might be seen as a reflection of unreality, mimicking the process created when our televisions act as a buffer between us and any real sense of immediacy or peril. Our resulting inability to empathize with those with first hand experiences may as well place them within imagined tropes of the hinterland, places that were harsh and at the end of the world, vivid in our minds, but too distant to hurt.

In my process, I go and seek little things that have been thrown to the side, things from the flea market and things found on the street. Plastic bits and pieces of styrofoam, made of petroleum, often unconsidered and thrown away, are my building blocks. Playing with scale and glamour, the camera comes in and transforms these wonky things, hopefully, into moments of magic and humor and latent gravity.