“Idle Speculation” started with photos of a scrubby spring bloom of weeds and wildflowers growing in a half-built office park in an industrial area in Phoenix – a fleeting bit of sublimity in a desolate and fallow landscape. For each work in this series, I have digitally layered multiple images of this piece of ground. Each source photograph is set to interact in a different way, its visual data variously amplifying, reversing or cancelling out specific aspects of the other image layers. Unaltered, the source photographs express some of the incidental beauty, but not the strange tension of the place. Layered together, the accretion of visual information creates a new space entirely, situated at the point where discernable distinction between the natural and the artificial dissolves, reflecting the indeterminacy of the site itself.
All images are printed as archival pigment prints at 41” x 51.25” image size in editions of 3 plus 1 AP.
2011