image detail from artist book, This Place Does Not Exist, 2024

Exploring the perception of landscape and place, my work manifests moments before change and destruction. The work draws attention to the notion of quiet unpredictability right before impending chaos. The landscapes, while subtle and layered, upend our sense of place and security. The image making properties of printmaking create the illusion of depth and allow for experimentation with surface treatments, including texture, matte, and glossy finishes.

Elements of tension, the breakdown of information and the fragility of circumstance culminate in prints and artists' books. This Place Does Not Exist is an artist book that combines abstracted, multiple plate linoleum print landscapes documenting the banality of passing landscapes and AI-generated photographs and poetry using a one sentence descriptive prompt based on the original photograph used for the linoleum prints. The work juxtaposes the hand and eye of the artist with AI interpretations of the same content. The AI images are printed using a CMYK letterpress process. Printed text includes a poem generated using ChatGPT and the brief statement used to generate both the poem and the AI photograph.

These two components are juxtaposed in the same space, with the linoleum prints demonstrating the hand and interpretation of the artist and the CMYK prints demonstrating AI’s ability to closely capture a place that may as well not exist due to its pass-through nature. This juxtaposition encourages a visual conversation between the artist and AI generated imagery. Additionally, this invites the viewer to contemplate their relationship with these pass-through spaces and to consider the use and reliability of AI to generate imagery based on a prompt.

All of my work is completed as series or multiples. The nature of the bound book structure allows me to work sequentially and I can control the order in which the viewer discovers the information, but only to a point. This is the inherent beauty of artist books - the provided structure allows the audience to alter or add to the meaning of the work through the viewing process. The book work is hand-printed, editioned and bound by me.