b. 1978 Hawai’i. Currently based in California.
My work consists primarily of large scale film landscapes of Hawai’i and the American West. Each project begins as an attempt to illustrate an extant piece of text. The reference materials vary from poetry and mythology to histories, textbooks, and maps. The goal is less documentation and more illustration, attempting to capture the character of a particular landscape rather than a certain moment in time.
The Leaping Place began as an exploration of my family’s immigration to Hawai’i in the 1880s, drawing on their own small histories to guide the path of my photographs. The project quickly grew to include several landscapes depicting scenes from the Kumulipo, a Hawaiian creation chant chronicling the cosmological beginnings of the islands and the Hawaiian people. The working assumption at every stage was that the tone and aspect of an environment form the basis of its local mythologies; the landscape influences not just what stories are told but how they’re told. This is especially true in Hawai’i, where the mythological relationship between landscape and persona, and between truth and fiction, is much different than in the European west. The Leaping Place is a small personal immigration story that uses various imagery and storytelling structure that emerged from the environment which it depicts. The images opened at the Honolulu Museum of Art accompanied by large sections of my research and of the Kumulipo. They were shortly thereafter realized in a book of the same name.
Counterbrand takes its name from a cattle ranching term, referring to a new brand placed on top of or next to an older one. The images center around the ranching and aerospace industries in Southern California and their rise and fall in the Antelope Valley, and follow the structure of land division / realty maps from the 1950s.
False Pond landscapes were made during the 2011-2017 drought in California and trace lines of irrigation moving water in to southern California.
Trees, Stars, and Birds was inspired by a book for children from the 1920s of the same name. The images are part of a series of reimagined illustrations to accompany the text. The long exposures were made at night using artificial light sources similar to theatrical lighting.