Peripheral Vistas:

Capturing the Numinous Inside and Out

What allows us to be receptive to experiencing moments in our daily lives as glimpses into the sublime, beautiful, wonderous, awesome, even magical?  The affinity to be aware of these perceptual facets ebbs and flows throughout different times in our lives given our individual circumstances. Within the course of a day, an hour, even a moment both mundane practical responsibilities and life altering events occur that upend one’s ability to witness mystery, throwing shadows along our path, threatening to cloud our eyes to the extraordinary that exist all around us.

By combining both photographic and painted images of domestic spaces and the natural world, alongside imagined spaces, I am collaging together layers of seemingly disparate places as a metaphor for the subjective and multilayered nature of our consciousness which coexists within our perception.  The use of the photograph has come to symbolize to me the “thinness” that a photo provides in depicting the out of the ordinary moments in time, as well as the futility in our attempts to capture the sublime in the commonplace.  In fact, we often are often so caught up behind a lens in the attempt to capture the moment that we completely miss being fully present in it.  I utilize the materiality of the paint to suggest a differing dimensional “density” to the otherness of the painted additions, each medium used to depict its own dimensional plane, yet coalescing as part of the same visual moment.

  The variety of interior and exterior spaces provide a metaphoric visual backdrop.  Not only is it in sublime panoramic vistas and bucolic landscapes, but in domestic spaces, backyards, stairwells, sidewalks, and junk piles that are often the unlikely places when we are caught off guard by something we catch a glimpse of out of the corner of our “mind’s eye”, if only for a second. I am creating liminal spaces for the incomprehensible to be seen, freezing in time that moment when our conscious realm brushes up against our incorporeal selves.  If ever so briefly, there is indeed wonder and mystery for us to be in touch with, lying just under the surface and along the peripheries of this earthly existence.