I’m pleased to announce that I have been awarded a grant from the City of Ottawa’s 2022 Creation and Production Fund for Professional Artists, for my project Sustainable Retreat. The fund supports local professional artists for the creation and production of new work or the completion of works in progress. 

For this project, I will experiment with post-production techniques to combine photographs of obsolete computers that I will take at the Ingenium Research Institute this Fall, with LeBreton Flat landscape photographs taken during my SPAO Artist-in-Residency this year. The new images, bordering between abstraction and reality, will imagine a future Earth in which people are confined to a virtual world, while “Mother Nature” slowly reclaims the Earth. My intent is for these images to help viewers navigate the contradiction between beauty and stagnation, wonder and fear, hopefulness and frustration, and techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, by providing visual clues to our uncertain future.

The images I create for this project will be significantly more challenging than those created for my Convergence portfolio. To produce believable, critical artwork, I will need to develop new photographic and post-production skills, and learn to print my work in an increasingly larger format. 

I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the City of Ottawa for this project.

Update:

The images below are from one the the artifacts that I photographed during my residency at Ingenium, a German RADAR from 1944 (front view and detail).