The Making of "Panoramic United States Abstracted"
Updated: Dec 19, 2022
This series that I have been working on since March 2020 is called "Panoramic United States Abstracted"; I have been traveling the country alone creating panoramic formatted photographs with an array of mirrors designed in the foreground of the landscapes. I have traveled to 18 different states - Georgia, Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, and Kentucky - and totaled ~15k miles traveled. I carried upwards of 20 mirrors to various predetermined locations, physically set them up for each shot, and later put the shots together.
One third of this series is from the southeast and was broken up across several weeks in the spring of 2020, while another third of the photographs are from the midwest and more western states were all from a 2 1/2 week roadtrip that I took January 2021, and the last third was from a 3 week roadtrip September-October 2022 to the more northwest states of the midwest...sleeping and living out of a rental car!
Traveling the country has always been a huge dream of mine, and while I am not even close to completing that goal, this gave me a massive taste of it and deepened my love, drive, and passion for it. While this series has been outwardly capturing the beautiful landscapes our country, and our world, has to offer, inwardly this series has been an intense self discovery journey for me. To give a snippet of insight as to how that is, I'll leave a little bit of my artist statement for the series below, along with some BTS photos from locations and some of my favorite images and panoramas! :)
"...The purpose is to build a collection of places while introducing my own life commentary, steering away from stereotypical landscape panoramas to catch the eye of viewers and demand more attention than a simple glance. Furthermore, I find that the arrangement of mirrors expresses the anxiety I have been feeling on an array of circumstances going on in my life. This is something that can be seen in the abundance of mirrors, how they all are facing and reflecting different things, breaking up the landscape and interjecting all sorts of subjects. All of which I have come to realize was a subconscious representation on my thoughts and emotions that day and the state my mind is in. Creating tight patterns and designs with the mirrors occupies my mind and allows me to focus on fabricating images and finding temporary stability with the process..."