Interim Landscapes is a body of work made at active construction sites near my home in the Coachella Valley. The sites I photograph are not dramatic or scenic in any conventional sense. They are dirt mounds pushed into shape by bulldozers and excavators piles of displaced earth that exist only temporarily before the development they are preparing for arrives. They are full of wild flowers, desert plants, and sand. Small ecosystems that have quietly taken hold in the disruption. Nobody looks at them twice. They are in-between places, functional and forgettable.
I am drawn to them precisely because of impermanence. The desert floor these sites sit on will never be this way again. Once the building goes up the land underneath it becomes permanently industrial paved, graded, sealed. What I am photographing is the last moment before that happens, a landscape that is neither what it was nor what it is about to become. It exists in a kind of suspended state and I feel an urgency to remember it.
The neon rope is how I mythologize and stage these sites. Placed directly on the terrain and photographed at night, the light traces the contours of the mounds following the ridgelines, pooling in the valleys, tracing the exact shapes left by the equipment that made them. The neon does not beautify the site so much as it insists on it. It says this place is worth looking at. It transforms a pile of construction dirt into something that reads as sacred, geological, otherworldly a landscape that deserves the same attention we give to places we have already decided matter. The documentation becomes an act of mourning as much as observation, a way of holding onto something the Coachella Valley is losing at a pace that is difficult to fully absorb.
This work connects directly to my ceramic practice. In both bodies of work I am doing the same thing taking something the landscape produced over a long period of time and asking people to look at it closely before it is gone. The difference is that in the ceramics the memory is compressed into an object you can hold. In Interim Landscapes the memory stays in the photograph, flat and fixed, a document of a place that no longer exists by the time anyone sees the image.
I am drawn to them precisely because of impermanence. The desert floor these sites sit on will never be this way again. Once the building goes up the land underneath it becomes permanently industrial paved, graded, sealed. What I am photographing is the last moment before that happens, a landscape that is neither what it was nor what it is about to become. It exists in a kind of suspended state and I feel an urgency to remember it.
The neon rope is how I mythologize and stage these sites. Placed directly on the terrain and photographed at night, the light traces the contours of the mounds following the ridgelines, pooling in the valleys, tracing the exact shapes left by the equipment that made them. The neon does not beautify the site so much as it insists on it. It says this place is worth looking at. It transforms a pile of construction dirt into something that reads as sacred, geological, otherworldly a landscape that deserves the same attention we give to places we have already decided matter. The documentation becomes an act of mourning as much as observation, a way of holding onto something the Coachella Valley is losing at a pace that is difficult to fully absorb.
This work connects directly to my ceramic practice. In both bodies of work I am doing the same thing taking something the landscape produced over a long period of time and asking people to look at it closely before it is gone. The difference is that in the ceramics the memory is compressed into an object you can hold. In Interim Landscapes the memory stays in the photograph, flat and fixed, a document of a place that no longer exists by the time anyone sees the image.