SOLO SHOW (TITLE TBD) COMING AUGUST 2024

In Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: The History of Walking, she describes walking as “labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals” (20). I am interested in how we can utilize technology to augment walking to connect with the landscape and the body. The study of walking through landscapes through a somatic lens promotes not only a connection between mind and body, but also a connection between body and land. As gentrification, industrialization, and commercialization expand, natural landscapes suffer and disappear. Solnit refers to walking now as having come to “a place where there is no public space and the landscape is being paved over, where leisure is shrinking and being crushed under the anxiety to produce […] In this context, walking is a subversive detour” (28). In our world dominated by an obsession with productivity, walking becomes radical act of connection and protest. My solo show will be a multi-modal investigation of walking through this lens.

I have been using photogrammetry and LiDar to create rapid 3D scans while out on walks. I enjoy that the process of scanning a section of the ground requires me to walk around, look, and direct my phone towards the ground from various angles. It begins to feel like a performance that also produces a 3D model. I am curious about the connections between 3D scanning and archive – how can we utilize 3D scans to capture our world as it is now to share with future generations? Will there be a future where we have 3D scans of our great grandparents, instead of just image and video? With the looming threats of climate change, it seems more important than ever to document and archive the land.

Initially, I was interested in using the information of a mostly – if not all – “natural” terrain. But as I have gathered scans, I begin to question - what is nature? We think of going on a hike as being in the natural landscape, but have we not intervened to create human-width paths on which to tread, not so dissimilarly to the paved roads for cars, or the laminated floors of indoor hallways? I’ve been drawn to scenes that call to this collaboration of what is natural, and how we both preserve and disturb – mismatched rocks laid out in an unnaturally straight line, manufactured bridges to cross over dribbling brooks, tread marks imprinted on grass by passing tires. I am finding myself drawn to the ways nature overtakes the built environment – leaves and moss sprawled across ground grates, moisture forcing vast canyons of cracks into once straight sidewalks. I am also consistently drawn to void spaces and barriers– down inside deep floor grates that the LiDar scanner can barely perceive, holes in trees that beckon to the imagination, walls meant to keep out or keep in, spaces that invite and spaces that exclude. Most of all, there is something about the inability to create a complete scan of the earth’s surface – at least with my hand and phone, walking and creating scans myself. I cannot fully enclose a scan of the ground into a solid that holds positive volume – it remains an incomplete surface. Even extruding the scans to prepare for 3D printing requires giving an arbitrary thickness to a fragment of earth that does not hold such regularity.