Magic Hour  

These works revolve around my own interactions and daily observations of the environment and landscape I occupy. Using printmaking, photographs, recorded audio material, and insights gleaned from visiting surrounding locations in the greater Southern California area, I focused on details of “nature” in our culture, more specifically elements that are in the background that may be overlooked but constitute the “natural” in urban settings. By integrating the ideas of faux along with my real experiences of nature, the questioning and posing of the friction between the two is brought to light. Each work presents a questioning of landscape and the realities of how the image or object came to formation, whether a direct representation through a photograph or construction through the hand.

The constructed rocks and boulders I used discarded and collected materials from my studio and home to blend, shape and construct the surfaces. The structures are housing speakers which play recordings taken during the hour of sunrise, otherwise known as “The Magic Hour” in bird watching, over the course of a week. The prints in the exhibition also take into consideration the fragmented reality of nature and aim to serve as an echoing of the constructions and materials found in the printed images and faux rocks.