Vanishing Vistas

Landscape Band-Aid

My work over the past twenty years addresses the world wide phenomenon of urban encroachment on the natural landscape, trans-national corporate culture and global homogenization. This inundation of ancient places, peoples, and traditions form impact areas in the deserts of the American Southwest. These impact areas are where I work.

In this current project titled “Landscape Band-Aids”, I symbolically “patch up” areas impacted by encroachment. I place photographs of healthy cactus and environments into these impacted areas then rephotograph the scene. These “patches” are crude and improvised, reflecting the stop gap measures of most efforts to lessen negative environmental impacts.

For instance, some local environmental regulations mandate the removal and transplantation of cacti from within areas that are to be “developed”. Few large cacti actually survive this process. I see these laws as a “band aid” approach to mitigating the impact of urban sprawl and like these regulations, my “patches” too are ultimately futile.