Feelings of anxiety about the sustainability of our suburban landscape mingled with a love of the mass-produced geometric forms found within this setting fuel my investigations. I drive through the car-oriented built environment foraging for structures that are overlooked, ordinary, outdated and unused. Then, I re-imagine these structures in order that they evoke something rooted in and yet beyond themselves. To achieve these ends, I utilize attributes associated with mass production such as repetition and homogeneity to create serial imagery, patterns and formations.

As I engage issues associated with abstraction and representation my ambition is that these composite pictures transform elements from the everyday into something worthy of contemplation. To realize this goal, I create visually dynamic images that will hopefully induce a subjective experience of visual pleasure in the viewer. At the same time, I want my work to convey a celebration of repetition and banality while acknowledging a tension rooted in the negative impact the car-oriented environment may have on our lives.

Imagine growing up in a suburban region that is dominated by a car-oriented built environment with its sprawling developments surrounded by a vast supply of parking. In fact, much of our country's population does live in this kind of setting but through everyday exposure many might become so used to this landscape that they never give it a second thought. Or someone might let their familiarity fuel an increasing fascination that leads to an observation and investigation of her surroundings. As an artist I chose to do exactly this as my work often depicts a relationship to a suburban context.

This series of large color photographs are partially literal in nature because they document actual structures that exist and have an affinity to the New Topographics because of a shared interest in the built environment. However, they are also somewhat invented in that they are reductions of what was originally photographed in the full frame. This results in a lone parking lot island in the midst of an empty white field. By doing this I hope to endow these pictures with an ambivalent subjectivity which represents a conflicted relationship to this environment - one imbued with humor and pathos.

There is no doubt that many suburbs are problematic environments with an often times forced dependence on the automobile being a primary issue. This leads to greater fossil fuel consumption, increased environmental pollution, and a more sedentary lifestyle. It also affects the ways in which we interact with others. And, yet, the suburbs have a rational, ordered beauty that one could appreciate just as one could value Minimalist sculpture with its geometric, mass-produced forms.