SPLEEN

(2010-2013)

Gelatin silver prints. Varying sizes. Edition of 5.

I have been looking at western art through to the invention of photography, and am struck by how the depiction of nature evolved into what we now refer to as landscapes - actual places, identified in time. The reality of landscape replaced the ideal of Nature.

Photography is the perfect medium for presenting a landscape. Inherently real, it organizes space and records time. But as we become aware of how our idea of landscape is a construct, nature reemerges as a separate concept. Nature becomes the reality, while landscape is but one way of representing it. I have been trying to convey, photographically, that reality of Nature independently of the construct of landscape.

The Gowanus canal is a cut into the urban space dating back to the heyday of Industrialization. In this detritus of modernity it is hard to distinguish between the constructed and the natural, between landscape and nature.