Golden Spring

I create stories about identity and the American landscape as a queer Oklahoman, destabilizing the traditionally masculine framework of landscape imagery. I envision worlds with more beauty and care, while acknowledging human’s future in the fossil record

In my creative practice, I make connections between memory and the landscape. Both change over time - fading, transforming. Some traces are concrete; they can be proven. Others are ephemeral and mystical. Using both the past and present, real and fabricated, I invoke comparisons between people and nature, life and decay, creation and destruction. I represent both shared and individual dreams and memories. Interstitial zones between natural, industrial, and domestic are stages for incantation to call forth these visions. On a broad scale, my work asks the viewer to consider how degradation of the land relates to erosion of family and community.

After moving from Oklahoma to California in 2020, I began making connections between these two places, both icons of America in very similar and very different ways. This quote by Joan Didion is a fitting summary for the addition of California imagery within my photographic narratives: “California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

This project is ready for exhibition. If honored with the PhMuseum 2024 Women Photographers Grant, I will use the supporting funds to purchase an Epson SureColor P9570 large format printer. This will allow me to print larger and at much lower costs than those I currently face when preparing for an exhibition. I also recently finished a certificate at the San Francisco Center for the Book. Being able to make affordable large prints will help me as I begin making book dummies for distribution. The awarded funds will allow me the access I need to continue my professional practice a the highest level.

The other offered prizes are equally impressive, and I will be thrilled for the recognition and support. I appreciate the judges' consideration and time.