The West

In this project, Ansel Adam's iconic photographs of the American landscape are re-made as gestural paintings on raw, inexpensive surfaces. Adam's famous clarity and tonal depth are obscured. His scope and scale are shifted to the tradition of epic paintings. This project is an effort to examine where representations of nature gain and lose power and how craft influences those results and interpretations. By subverting celebrated images of the American West, this project seeks to contradict the consuming goal of Manifest Destiny often present in romantic or grand depictions of natural settings.

Though the values associated with craft are challenged, Adam's commitment to conservation remains. Ideally, while these works make an effort to challenge notions of representation and preciousness, they confirm the importance of places like those Adams documented by reminding the viewer (and the painter) that representations, no matter how accomplished, always exist separate from the actual experience of nature.