ARTIST'S STATEMENT

The industrial flats of Cleveland has become the focus of my work over the past two years. This area sparks my interest immensely because it appears to me as the land of apocalypse, an image often lurking in the back of my head. It is the land of barren landscapes and towering steel edifices with 30-foot high flames bursting forth from the blast furnaces of the steel factories beneath them.

The images in which we can see the steel factories themselves are important to my work. These monstrosities may stand as some of the last remnants to remind us of a cunning evolution of mechanical ideas which, in the end, poses as an impossible network of black metal veins and intestines that all lead to the common goal of the production of one red-hot block of inorganic excrement. Their invention was crucial in the coming of the machine to human life, helping overcome tremendous physical obstacles.

Now, though they still function, they are part of our mythology. I have become increasingly interested in what is implied by these industrial landscapes. I see the machinery and factories as mystical entities, almost as though they no longer exist in the present. Visually interesting in their sometimes-bizarre colors and mysterious appearance, my images portray the vanishing physical elements in our world.

Everywhere we look, we see digital devices replacing the facets of our physical reality. We press buttons to translate our thoughts into electric pulses that travel through a network of circuits that surrounds the globe. We sit for hours, motionless in front of a box through which we learn what is funny, what we need, who won the baseball game, and what tomorrow's weather will be. My photographs are the result of my reverence for the beauty of the real world. I see the dirt. I see the roots of trees and ivy crumbling concrete, piercing thick, rusted steel tanks, reclaiming the fallen beasts that were once the proud triumphs of mankind over nature.

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