Momentous Reckoning reimagines the presence and absence of the Confederate monuments that were erected after the Civil War. Using appropriated negatives from the Jim Crow-era postcard archives of the Detroit Publishing Company along with text from various Confederate monument inscriptions, the book confronts our perceptions and understanding of race and the legacies of history with a contemporary reckoning of societal transformation and change. With each monument image, the statue has been extracted, leaving a slight trace of what was once present.
Collections
Emory University, Special Collections
Louisiana State University, Special Collections
University of North Texas, Special Collections
Whispers In The Apple Orchard
Whispers In The Apple Orchard offers impressions of stillness and quiet contemplation of the Japanese American experience at the Manzanar War Relocation Center from World War II in the Eastern Sierra Nevada.
Located in the Owens Valley just at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, the Manzanar War Relocation Center was the first of the 10 concentration camps to be established that began accepting detainees in March, 1942 following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. By July of 1942, the population of the camp had grown to nearly 10,000 Japanese Americans with about 90 percent of the incarcerated from the Los Angeles area.
In the fall of 1943, Ansel Adams, well-known for his famous Western landscape photographs, including Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, documented the Manzanar War Relocation Center. The resulting work, a departure from his photographs depicting beauty in the landscape, concentrated on portraits of the detained and their activities of family life in the barracks and at work in the camp. In 1944, Adams published his photographs and text in a 112-page book, Born Free and Equal, which had received positive reviews and made the San Francisco Chronicle’s bestseller list for March and April of 1945.
14-1/2 x 11-3/4 x 5/8 inches
Traditional Katazome-shi paper covered binders board with Iris book cloth binding and hinged mylar title
Seven (7) 14 x 11 inch broadsides
Tipped-on archival inkjet photographs and appropriated portraits printed on mylar from the Ansel Adams archive in the Library of Congress
Text fragments adapted from original writing and personal narratives recorded and cataloged by Densho, a digital archive relating to the Japanese American experience.
Somewhere Out There, Something Is Happening is an ongoing series of artist print books, including photographs and fragmentary text, that meditate on the physical places and psychological spaces of the contemporary American social landscape. Each book considers our inescapable history and whether what is past is a prologue of something happening now.
Collections
Carleton College, Gould Library Special Collections
Colorado College, Charles L. Tutt Library Special Collections
Louisiana State University, Special Collections
Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library Special Collections
Once known as the “petroleum graveyard,” Beneath the Dirt of Great Men exposes the carbon landscape in the Permian Basin of Southeast New Mexico and West Texas. With climate change, land use, and energy policy at the forefront of our national consciousness, the photographs, sculpture works and a portfolio print book contemplate the extraction of crude oil and natural gas in the largest reserve of these natural resources in the United States.
Collections
Scripps College, Denison Library Special Collections
Stanford University, Bowes Art & Architecture Library
University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library Pictorial Collections
University of California, Santa Cruz, McHenry Library, Special Collections
University of Southern California, Special Collections
Estamos Buscando A is a multi-faceted series that explores and contemplates the migrant experience in Mexico along the U.S. – Mexico border through various practices, including site-specific public art installation, a gallery installation as well as a migrant guide photo book, spanning a period of 15 year from 2002 – 2017.
Inspired by a dream about seeking comfort and solitude in a moment of isolation, Bajo La Luna Verde | Under The Green Moon is a backlit transparency (48 x 72 x 2 inches), revealing a self portrait while being alone during a day and night in the Sonora Desert in Mexico in an attempt to cross the U.S. – Mexico border twelve miles west of the Sasabe Port of Entry.
With the support of a Fulbright-Garcia Robles Fellowship in 1997 and drawing inspiration from the pulp comic of the same name, Tierra Brava traverses a personal psychological space within the color of a place mired in contradictions; the U.S. – Mexico border. It is a place that is in a constant search for its own sense of identity, juggling the traditions of culture and history of the interior with the pleasures and promises of prosperity and a better life of its northern neighbor. It is not Mexico and not the United States, but rather something and somewhere in-between.
Secrets stay behind and anything goes in this desert playground of Las Vegas. Gardens of Paradise embraces the grit of paid companionship and sexuality in the casino fountains and gardens of the Strip, an area known as Paradise.
Lure of the Open provokes past memories of the rights of passage into manhood and coming to terms with loss through the bonding experiences of fishing and hunting in Nature’s wilderness.
Collections
Stanford University, Special Collections – Gunst Collection
Estamos Buscando A (2002 – 2004)
Nuevo Amanecer (1998)
Tierra Brava Nº1 (1996 – 2010)
Tierra Brava Nº2 (1996 – 2010)
Tierra Brava Nº3 (1996 – 2010)
Cancer Alley – Louisiana & New York (1993 – 1995)
King of the Compacts (1992)
Los Vendimiadores (1988 – 1989)
Where The Sidewalk Ends (1987 – 1989)