2014-Current > Five Miles/Twenty Years

Aerial imagery renders landscapes as neutral and homogenous abstractions. They bring a river valley to the same plane as a grain silo and compose two-dimensional space by the color and value of crops, rooftops, and roadways. Such images are archived in mass in both physical and digital spaces. These visual records, which index land at specific times, are stored as negatives in drawers, piles of prints, and terabytes of data with varying degrees of accessibility.
Five Miles/Twenty-Five Years features photographic and sculptural works that activate omniscient aerial views layered with imagery from a human scale. The works reference archival images of land that has since been further modified by humans, specifically coal mining and transport infrastructure.

This project is the latest in my works about land, human intervention upon it, and how the
intersection of land and the human-made can shape our conceptions of both the past and present. It seeks to visualize the symptomatic evidence of the passage of time in land, infrastructure, and domestic spaces. These spaces bind together the incomprehensible deep time (or geologic time), to that of capital, and the cycles of consumption, and occupancy that comprise and punctuate our day-to-day existence.