Strange Nature (SELECT IMAGES)

STRANGE NATURE began as a collection of unexpected encounters made while traveling through varied landscapes OF THE AMERICAN WEST. Rather than photographing landscape in a traditional sense, the work isolates moments when the natural world briefly appears unfamiliar, unstable, or alive. Steam rises like figures, ocean foam resembles bone or tissue, sand plumes take on ghostly forms, and mineral formations appear almost sculptural. Across the series, natural forces such as wind, water, erosion, and accumulation generate temporary structures that seem to hover between abstraction and recognition.

By often removing the horizon line and isolating fragments of the environment, the photographs destabilize the viewer’s sense of scale. Geological formations can appear microscopic, while fleeting atmospheric events feel monumental. This ambiguity allows the images to move between landscape, still life, and abstraction, creating a visual space where the ordinary becomes strange.

While many of the images document chance encounters discovered while traveling, the series also incorporates subtle interventions by the artist. In several photographs, natural materials were manipulated directly within the landscape—sand tossed into the air to create fleeting ghost-like figures, or colored gels introduced through artificial light to transform familiar terrain into strange and unfamiliar environments. These gestures blur the line between observation and construction, allowing the work to move fluidly between found phenomena and deliberate image-making.

At its core, Strange Nature is about recognition—moments of noticing when the landscape briefly transforms into something uncanny. The photographs document fleeting events, accidental sculptures, and constructed interventions that reveal a world constantly shifting, improvising forms, and momentarily imitating life