Landscape Vernacular
The Landscape Vernacular series is an ongoing body of work I began in the spring of 2011 that explores landscape terminology and imagery. Culling from a small collection of dictionaries dating from the early 1800s to the present, these collages juxtapose definitions with period ephemera to explore ideas and attitudes about land and land use while also addressing the history of landscape painting, American identity, and contemporary environmental concerns. The austere look of the series emanates from self-imposed limitations with materials and a process to incorporate them: vintage end pages, book engravings and maps, digital technology, and puzzle-piece-fit or interlocking collage. While I have an extensive library of paper books for making my collages, I also cull online archives for images and texts that can support the needs of any given work. Regarding digital technology, I am strict about not morphing, inventing, or embellishing textual or visual information in the Landscape Vernacular collage series, but I sometimes edit and resize my found materials. I print onto period endpapers to fabricate source materials that are as close to a facsimile as possible. I make technological hybrid collages using 19th- and 20th-century materials re-made in the 21st century. The Landscape Vernacular series is an offshoot series of another body of work that also uses blank pages as a conceptual practice.