There was a time when I wasn’t sure if the terms Surreal and Sublime were applicable in art, and I feel each of us has uttered the words “Not another Landscape painting” when encountering another landscape painting. I felt thinking about the cannon of Landscape Painting or Land Art was like beating a dead horse, but I was fooling myself. I’m not hating, but I felt something needed to be done to move the genres of Landscape and Nature forward to reactivate the Surreal and Sublime as they are important waypoints in Art History. For me, moving forward meant looking closely and asking what a landscape is in the age of nature manipulation, extreme drought, water shortages, and climate change.

As a Southwest U.S. native, it was incredibly hard not to fall in love with the arid red rock landscape with its blooming mountainous canyons and forever-reaching horizons. The visible erosion of the land due to the weather conditions of heat, rain, and wind has given us one of the most spectacular visual events on the planet. Nearly unbelievable to witness.

I no longer live in the Southwest, and my love for it has become overwhelming. I want to take that landscape with me the way a photographer does in their photograph. My lust to be in that land brought me to focus on its creation - the movement of water.

In that, I landed on the simple natural process of water evaporation. I looked at what created the desert landscape and took the natural elements of heat, air, and water - metaphorically transporting them thousands of miles away to my studio. Creating climates mimicking the arid desert of the United States Southwest, my result was the aestheticizing of time, space, and nature.