Portland

A “One Eighty” is a term used in skateboarding where you spin on the skateboard one hundred and eighty degrees to face the opposite direction. As a young teenager, my after-school time was spent obsessively perfecting One Eighties, Three Sixties, Handstands, and Slalom Maneuvers, in the parking lots of nearby factories. Although I am no longer a skater, I’m still very drawn to skateboarding and the environment where skateboarding occurs. These places become a sacred space for physical expression, communal support, and in my eyes, a type of meditation.

June has arrived and hopefully, in the next month, we’ll see some sunshine in Portland. And when this elusive sun stretches its rays into our atmosphere, my friend Heidi Kirkpatrick will have Potassium ferricyanide and Ferric ammonium citrate on hand, ready to make more beautiful cyanotypes.

I have adopted the core principles of alchemy in my work and am informed by this alchemical idea of transformation. The colors and images I create are through a transformative process of light manipulation and chemical action. One of my primary ways of manipulating light is by reflecting and refracting it through prismatic materials to capture the spectrum of color contained within white light. This color dance is further mimicked by the photographic paper itself, the resulting color is the opposite color that was used to expose it. I further explore transformation with chemical reactions. I can make an assortment of colors from the reactions of the two chemicals that are used for processing color prints.

Speed, duration, temperature, and light are some of the variables that factor into what color the chemical reactions make. I am fascinated by the alchemical process, for it is never complete, each piece will continue to slowly evolve with time, just like you and me.

“The Great River of the West'' is a photographic survey of the 1250 mile long Columbia River, from its source in the Canadian Rockies, to the confluence with the Pacific, exploring its current cultural and economic landscape, with an eye towards its significance in the history of the Pacific Northwest and North America. The following photographs are sequenced geographically, with the first image at the source and the last at the confluence.

This project began during a period of unwanted and unexpected isolation, brought on by the COVID-19 Pandemic. With all photographic work at a sudden standstill, we began with self-portraits as a way to wrestle with our own anxiety and preserve an unprecedented time in history. As photographers that is how we naturally respond to things. We photograph them if only to have a record of their existence.