Cattle Call

<h2 id="containerPhotoDescription"><span id="photoDescription" class=" txtClrDef">This image is dominated by the horse and the rocks. A low sun casts long shadows at the end of the day.</span></h2>

Little House

As Woodbury Grows

Don't Box Me In!

<h2 id="containerPhotoDescription"><span id="photoDescription" class=" txtClrDef">This poor horse has finally lifted her head from gazing at the grazing to notice that something is happening....</span></h2>

Smokestack City

Purple Haze, Things Don't Seem The Same

Expansive

The Citylife

Crowded

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It
is a strange feeling when this huge world cannot seem to find any place
to grow but straight into what you feel is your personal space.
We form connections with places within context of our experience there.
When the fringes of suburban expansion slowly chew away at a wide-open
space, the previous connection with that space is irreconcilably altered.


The goal of this series is to evoke feelings of containment, isolation,
and claustrophobia as the small homestead rapidly forces the wild open
space out of view. As the compositions get increasingly intricate,
muddled with layers of city buildings, the horse starts to look up from
his grassy dinner—obviously too late to do anything. This is
a literal metaphor for what happened in my life: as I was learning and
growing in rural corn-and-soy-land of Minnesota, I chose to ignore the
buildings budding up one at a time at the horizon. After two years,
it was impossible to ignore the roar of bulldozers leveling the anomalies
of the land that were such treasures. The wild dips and hills
were cut and filled to build monotonous suburban McMillionaire mansions,
and we were told by the city that we could not ride on their streets.
The world I knew morphed in front of my eyes, and I disdained the replacement
because I was no longer a part of it. I thought I knew that the
world was huge.. and now I do know!

The process of creating
this series followed a similar linear process to suburban expansion.
It began simple, and proceeded at a thundering pace, fueled not so much
by petroleum as by the sadness, pain, and fear that had crystallized
deep in my understanding of this land. As the town grows to a
city, the horse’s form expresses some anxiety, and the city soon launches
helicopters into the air. The city grows and crowds, and grows
and crowds, until looking at the horse from a comfortable distance is
not possible, and his story is equally impossible to ignore.

Printmaker

Suburbanization
Hobbyhorse: Connecting the Wild and the Constructed
Variations on a Scene
Peruvian Caballos
Dream Riders
Medicine Bags