"There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made." A century ago, Willa Cather used these words to describe the landscape of the United States. The West was developed and now the land is ravaged and wilderness is quarantined. The marred landscape chronicles the American Way as a voracious consumption of raw materials and space, the construction of boundaries, and an evacuation that declares obsolescence. Emptied towns and silent telephone lines, rusting dumpsites and exhausted mines are defined by entropy. Once remarkable for its unbounded natural beauty that fueled human ambition, much of the land in the West is scarred and disregarded.

I examine the visual evidence of land use in the American West and its cycles of production, consumption, and waste. Through the vernacular of landscape painting, and using parking lots, desolate factories, and junk heaps as my source material, I explore the delineation between land and landscape, beauty and banality. My work scrutinizes the aesthetic mitigation that often camouflages humanity's dependence on nature. I respond to the places where the organic and the artificial rasp against each other. This post-industrial landscape is the physical manifestation of modern needs, economies, policies, and powers, yet I approach it as a pure spectacle. I aspire to elucidate and aestheticize the friction, grandeur, mystery, frankness, degeneration, necessity and beauty in the contemporary American landscape.