After Landscapes
The exhibition After Landscapes at The Lawndale Art Center in Houston, TX included two new series of works:
The Prairie Conglomerates are informed by two small swatches of prairie that run along the railroad tracks in front of my house. These are remnants of a large prairie and vast wetland, now called Kasota Ponds, which once connected the two cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Most of the wetlands have been filled in and much of the prairie has been paved over, but some small snippets remain along the rail yard.
The Portfolio of Lost Prairie Plants are an ongoing series of small archival inkjet prints made by scanning the cut up, left over "shells" of the photographs that were cut up to make the Prairie Conglomerates. These remnants are layered, scanned, enlarged and reprinted to the scale of a traditional botanical illustration, yet the plant at the center of the page is missing.
Together these works reference the fragility of the prairie landscape and its gradual disappearance.