Having spent my youth in Minnesota, The Land of 10,000 Lakes, I never gave water a second thought, it was everywhere always and forever. I arrived in California during a drought and became fascinated with the extensive means employed to manage water system, the interaction of this infrastructure with the landscape and the populations’ contact with their most valuable resource in nature.

With elements of the watercourse as my guide, I am making photographs that communicate the bizarre reality in the engineering of the water system and its abstract relationship between the people and the altered landscape. I see this system as a cultural conduit that connects the regions of this vast land. Snow that collects high on the Sierra Nevada to the faucets of homes in Orange County and ultimately out to sea. All along the way picking up bits and leaving behind pieces from its journey.

California has long been thought of as a place of freedom and abundance where riches are made and lives remade. The reality is it’s a difficult place to exist in the simplest of terms. Extensive systems make this land habitable. With time the reliability of the infrastructures becomes less certain as does our ability to find harmony with our environment. While my work uses California as the grounds for investigating that relationship, this is a valuable consideration for all.