Artist Statement
These images are part of an ongoing project that documents the transition of a large undeveloped suburban area of Minneapolis into a planned community of mega stores, strip malls, high-density housing and hotels. This area serves up a landscape of intent on a vast scale. A drive down the main thoroughfare here drives this point home: one side of the road is a converging sea of themed architecture in various stages of completion, while the opposite side is a vista of endless mountains of dirt, rock and sand being carved out of the earth.
While the undeveloped land is being stripped, dug up and flattened in preparation for commercial exploitation, it is also being mined for the sand and gravel under its topsoil. It is a raw, almost monochromatic landscape. A sense of flux permeates the area as large, mobile machinery and equipment slowly disembowels it. I have spent my mornings and evenings here for the past four years photographing the resultant landscape. On one level, my images are documents of the physical power exerted upon the landscape by this equipment. On another level, my photographs aim to convey the emotional undercurrents of violence, desolation and control that one encounters when immersed in this landscape.
The physical transformation of this land is also symbolic of the underlying social and economic forces that drive the process of urban sprawl. This sprawl, in turn, is changing both the physical and political landscapes of our country as people migrate outward from the central cities to these planned communities of mega stores, strip malls and conspicuous housing. Instead of taking a dogmatic approach to this project by condemning urban sprawl, I would rather inspire awareness of the process and help to pose questions that a development of this magnitude raises.
I shoot with 35mm and medium format cameras using color negative film. My film is scanned at high resolution, sharpened and adjusted in Photoshop, and printed out on an Epson inkjet printer using archival pigment inks and photorag paper. I print at 9.5x14 with a frame size of 16x20 for the 35mm images, and 16x16 with a frame size of 24x23 for the medium format images. An installation of this project would comprise a minimum of 20 images and a maximum of 40.
