Sun Stroke at Plaza Blanca (2022)

Each of the works in Sun Stroke at Plaza Blanca is a composite of thousands of image fragments taken from dozens of photographs that have been broken up and stitched back together by an algorithmic command. The subject of these works is Plaza Blanca; a landscape of dramatic white sandstone rock formations near Abiquiu New Mexico made famous by Georgia O’Keefe in the 40s. O'Keefe's paintings of Plaza Blanca, known to her as “The White Place”, are part of a body of work that defined landscape and nature in the Southwest (and in many ways nature and landscape at large) as romantic, exotic, and picturesque. O’Keefe’s works in this place offer a deeply personal and expressly human vision– when visiting Plaza Blanca today it is easy to position yourself precisely where she stood to paint The White Place in Sun (1943) and experience the place almost exactly as you have experienced the painting. Art and images have always had an outsized effect on our attitudes towards nature and environmental issues, for better and for worse. The works I present here come from a feeling that new ways to see landscapes and to understand the human/nature relationships they represent are now necessary. The images in Sun Stroke are composites of 10-15 different viewpoints, processed by an algorithm that selects only the sharpest focal points in each photograph, and then stitches them together into an almost seamless composition. Interestingly for a project that is so digital in nature, the works are only really effective when viewed in person. Seen from a distance, the large scale prints look cohesive and unmanipulated, but as the viewer gets closer they will find an overwhelming sharpness of detail, impossible combinations of scale and direction, and a blending of vantage points that can never be parsed. These works are speculative and experimental. They are an attempt at seeing and understanding a landscape outside of accepted cultural conventions, and beyond the usual scope, scale, and duration of our looking.