Through the Static and Distance
The southern New Mexico area I’ve explored during my time at the Roswell Artist-in-Residence program has become, for me, a storied landscape. With chevrons of sandhill cranes, lightning of monsoon season, and stark, weathered buildings, my wanderings have registered a kind of synapse between the traces of human existence and the realm of natural phenomena.
For me the experience of being out in the New Mexico landscape is like a walking meditation. The three marks of existence are a Buddhist concept for characterizing our reality. They are impermanence, imperfection and emptiness. I feel like these terms can also describe the experience of being in this landscape.
Walking across the high plains of New Mexico, you come across things that have been left there. Used up and abandoned — things that seem to have some kind of story. Any purpose we impose on the landscape leaves a mark which can be overt, or it can faintly reveal a past narrative. These signs/signals inhabit our everyday world, where collectively they can take on the qualities of a dream or myth.
Atoms are composed almost entirely of space. The weight of an average cloud passing overhead is a million pounds yet seems weightless.
A photograph has a frequency. We can understand the signal on some level when we feel the resonance of an image. Or In the words of the late photographer/educator Nathan Lyons: “Photography is, when used with its regard for inherent directness, a unique and exacting means of isolating inner realities found in correspondence with the physical world.”
Photography is also a means of collecting: Flocks of birds perforating the sky; a car hood with a constellation of holes shot through it; posts standing in formation framing earth and sky, their billboard and its message long gone; the patina on a corrugated metal facade; Capitan Peak always in the distance, shrouded by weather and endless sky.
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