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(2013 - 2023)
ink jet prints mounted to Dibond, looping video works, painted wall installation
prints 46.25” x 39.5” & 39.5” x 46.25” / videos variable sizes
Staring Into Fog is a series of visual musings on the act of concealing and revealing. In the summer of 2013, while standing on Signal Hill in St. John’s, Newfoundland, I witnessed a thick fog move inland from the sea, embrace the city’s harbor like a blanket and then retreat to the ocean. For the decade following, I became obsessed with fog as a photographic subject, one that obscures the referent and is the referent at the same time. Fog is a non-subject, a subversion of photography’s descriptive capacity. It engulfs the visual plane and hides distinguishable realities behind it, suggesting the unseen. Though, it’s not just a hazy nothingness but rather millions of imperceptible water droplets suspended in air, countless slight variations of colour and form. There must be something in there.
I hunted the natural phenomenon in three of the foggiest locations in North America: St. John’s, Newfoundland; Cape Disappointment, Washington; and various locations on Vancouver Island. The resulting imagery brings us adjacent with our shared struggle to understand what it is we see in front of us.