National Parking

digital slideshow (2009)
photo book (2010)

Digital photographs are one component of a multimedia work including TitledPainted WallNature Trail, and Consequence Canyon. They’ve been shown as a projection and printed in a coffee table book. These are selected excerpts.

National Parking explores connections between the institutions of art gallery and national park. As destinations, both offer transcendent experience in a public setting and derive authority or importance from notions of beauty. The viewer of my work encounters representations of landscape that simultaneously celebrate and question the idealization of nature in art. Nature is presented as a construction, a product of human perception and action. National parks, iconic of the natural beauty of America, are shown to require a great deal of maintenance and infrastructure toward their production of particular experiences of nature. Likewise, the gallery space, often valued for the apparent absence of contextual noise that might detract from artwork, is implicated as a mediated environment with a specific set of rules governing the experiential possibilities within its walls.