Badlands

The Badlands series is in one way a classic landscape series, celebrating the stark and unforgiving beauty of the New Mexico high desert. Stone and sky come together in landscapes indifferent and majestic. But there is a secret player in these images. That is time, geologic time, time beyond the ken of mortals. Here as nowhere else time is visible in the exposed strata and the deformations of the earth itself, in the isolated rock perched atop a column of stone that has been narrowing grain by grain for millions of years. TIme that we can see but not fathom intuitively. Man is absent in these images, as he is too fleeting, too irrelevant, his lifespan a mere narrowing of the column that holds up a single stone.

Collectively the work in this portfolio is something of a trilogy of time visualized. The indifferent geologic time of the landscapes, the subjective momentary time of the individual nude, and the ritual communal time of carnival. The first is vast and indifferent, the second is personal and existential, the last is hypnotic and transcendental.