"Topanga Ranch Motel, Pacific Coast Highway - Limited Edition of 25" Photograph

My photographs are in many museum collections including: Weisman Art Museum, Tweed Museum of Art, Minnesota Historical Society, Fisher Art Museum, University of Southern California, Laguna Art Museum, The Autry Museum, Peppers Art Gallery, University of Redlands, and Cornell Museum of Fine Arts.

My photographs explore ideas of national and personal identity, social class, dreams, and desire, through the examination of the social landscape.

This landscape includes natural and manufactured environments, monuments, routes, destinations, and fences and borders both real and imagined.

My medium is photography, which captures nuances of light, however, I reveal the other elements as well, air, and the reflections and shadows of the water too.

My photographs serve as a meditation on the mythology of the American West, the effects of suburban expansion on the American Dream, and the exploitation of natural resources including air and water.

I was born in Minneapolis and grew up in St. Cloud, Minnesota, midwestern cities and towns located on the upper Mississippi River. I was eager to see more of the west and attended the University of Redlands, a liberal arts college in Southern California. There, at the edge of the desert, I became fascinated with how differently the landscape was arranged and how people navigated the country.

After graduate school in Chicago, I returned to Los Angeles and worked in Hollywood, primarily as a location scout and photographer. This gave me opportunity to explore the social fabric of Los Angeles, Hollywood, the beachside communities, far-flung commuter suburbs, and the high desert too. These journeys informed my art and have given me an insider’s knowledge of LA environs, albeit with an outsider’s point of view.

I have been influenced by the work of photographers Timothy O’Sullivan and Robert Adams, graphic artists Katsushika Hokusai and Ando Hiroshige, painters Thomas Cole and Ed Ruscha, and filmmakers John Ford, Akira Kurosawa, and Jim Jarmusch.

I received a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant in 2015 allowing me to produce an exhibition titled “Confluence,” which explored the geographic place where the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers meet. This show traveled to many Minnesota museums in 2016-2018.