Deep Time
The exhibition Deep Time includes paintings and collage that explore the contrast of human time and deep time through geology and the contemporary landscape. Archives and collection, landscape, materiality, grief and loss, and the nature of perception are consistent themes in this work. My recent collages draw on images cut from books about rocks and minerals, the 2019 Christie’s Auction House catalog for Meteors and Fossils, the TIME Life “Library of Photography” book series, mid-century texts about land preservation, state parks and geology. The mural situates images of crystallographic x-rays, the heavens, meteors and an eclipse within the Kentucky landscape my father's family farmed and care-took for over a century before resources like white oak were sold off and no one remained to farm or care for the land. The ways in which economic pressures and climate change resituate my ideas, as a painter, about the historic genre of landscape into the genre of still-life with its embrace of memento mori- or remember you must die- is central to this work. The grief of living in the anthropocene underscores my love and longing for the world.