At Home with Nature
This series of photographs continues to explore the relationship between humans and the natural world. In most of the photographs nature is depicted as an image: to be reproduced, hung on the wall, worn or looked at in a book. Many of the objects in the photos contain decals of flowers and leaves. (We can make our own nature!) Chairs suggest human presence - getting comfortable and occupying space. And plastic is insidiously ever-present.
The current discourse regarding nature/artifice is broad. As Joshua Corey writes in the introduction to The Arcadia Project “nature becomes what the pastoral always already was: a charged ideological fantasy that is not only ideological, but a structural reality nine-tenths buried in the unconscious of society, sending us messages in the forms of symptoms we name tsunamis, snowstorms, extinctions, asthma.” “Reality as we know it is no longer the perceptual, tactile, Baconian world of grasses and trees, shepherds and sheep. Ours is a virtual world of overlapping simulacra in which the very concept of “nature” is challenged, denatured, filtered and reborn.” *
*From The Arcadia Project, North American Postmodern Pastoral, Joshua Corey, 2012