Ruins (At Least there's an avant-garde, you and I)
Archival pigment prints, variable scale. 2009-10.
Ruins was photographed on the Galápagos islands and in the Galápagos landscape, a site permeated by romanticized 'natural' space, the constant flux of eco-tourism, the unlikely birthplace of post- Enlightenment science, and a topography that stubbornly resists such idealizations.
In this multifaceted work I take on the persona of the isolated artist, working as an 'island,' creating a fragmented picture reminiscent of modernist accounts of the artist and his practice. Using video, text, and photography, I write "letters" back to a "home" that seems to exist in an indeterminate state of pre- or post- revolution. I see these "letters" as machinic devices use to ironize both the aesthetics and politics of the island encounter.