VALLEY COSMO(S)
(ongoing)
A kind of geological survey from home in Texas; Valley Cosmo(s), begun in 2021, uses street photographs to record the land’s surface layers alongside abstract expressionist paintings that chronicle the tectonic emotional landscape just below the surface experienced across every corner of the same dusty terra firma.
Black and white images focus on our urban frontiers — landscapes rarely apart of the visual conversation of west America — as well as the shared, wild bits that living within the oceanic acreage of the region entails…our fires and drought; water restrictions and turquoise springs; the dinosaur bones we still find and the Indigenous reality of today; the silence of real life on an international border and the politics of land use—where death and the passage of time are so incredibly palpable.
The immediate, reactive, near-daily painted works depict the loudest solitude of the mind deeply intertwined with the land, from the Gulf Coast to the Chihuahuan Desert, the Llano Estacado of the north to the Rio Grande/Bravo borderlands.
A galaxy of newness and myth, a follow-up to the trope through space and time, a feral view of the agitated land and human existence below the harshest sun.
