"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 middle part of the United States. Now that this country has been made, its center bears the mark. The marred Western landscape chronicles the American Way as a voracious consumption of raw materials and space, the construction of boundaries and places, and an evacuation that declares obsolescence. Emptied towns and silent highways, as well as abandoned factories, rusting dumpsites, and exhausted mines are defined by awkward entropy. Once remarkable for its unbounded natural beauty that fueled human ambition, much of the heartland of America is scarred and discarded.

I examine the visual evidence of land use in the post-industrial American West and its distinctive cycles of production, consumption, and waste. Painted in super-flat, uninflected planes of color, the impersonal impeccability of the machine aesthetic informs my work. I create deliberately uncanny color combinations in my paintings to denaturalize the commonplace yet ironically complex sites of comodified land. Through the vernacular of landscape painting, and using parking lots, highways, ore piles, factories, and junk heaps as my source material, I explore the delineation between land and landscape, beauty and banality. I approach the world through the trifocal lens of artist, environmentalist, and self-conscious consumer. My artistic inquiry responds to the legacy of friction between humanity and the natural world.