These projects explore how we experience common natural landscapes in an age some have described as post-nature. The photographs were made in “half wilderness” areas that exist near the edges of exurban life in the upper Midwest.

 

Broadly speaking, my work asks what value does nature in these places have, and how do cultural perspectives such as history, religion, and myth affect how we understand landscapes.

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The River is a portrait of the lower Wisconsin as it flows through the Driftless Region between Sauk City and the Mississippi. Much of this 90-mile distance is within the protected Lower Wisconsin Riverway, whose 95,000 acres of public and private land include some of the best examples of rare native plant communities in the Midwest.

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The Driftless Region extends the scope of The River to its wider watershed and to parts of the Driftless beyond Wisconsin. The region is so named because the last several Midwest glaciers flowed around it. No glacial drift filled the region's many valleys, leading to its hallmark bluff-and-coulee character and unusual ecology. 

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This is not wilderness but it does contain wildness. In this zone people encounter an expression of nature that may seem at first unremarkable, but only because of its nearness to our everyday lives. For me that's the point: I believe it is critically important that we find value in the natural world that exists in the places where we are.

 

Spirituality and Place explores the intersection of landscape, sacrality, and sense of belonging to a place. It asks whether sacred space still exists in our culture, and how it might be expressed if it does. It also considers how nature can serve as a language which we use to help articulate our intuitions about the sacred.​ Mostly shot in Wisconsin, the project also includes similar expressions of sacred place in the American Southwest, and follows certain Polish-Catholic traditions that are found in Wisconsin back to their roots in Poland.

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Finally, Genius Loci plays with reassembling photographs to create a different way of imagining the landscape. Genius loci is a Latin term meaning "the character of a place", or, as the Romans and other's believed, refers to a spirit which dwells there or protects it. 

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Beginning with a photo of a natural site where I felt an emotional response, the pictures were cropped, rotated, copied as mirror images, and recombined. This produced surprising creature-like shapes that could be read as personifications of the genius loci, if only imagined. While whimsical, the pictures remind us that we are part of a natural world where unexpected mystery and meanings await our notice.

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