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Rock Records are photo-installations of monumental boulders set in relationships with each other and with small-scale inset images, which deepen the conversation for the viewer up close. The visual language includes rocks, construction debris, and trash bags. Weirdly, at a certain distance, they all resemble each other.
The work interrupts and re-layers geological presence with the mundane built landscape. I adapt tactics common in memorial-making, which often involve adding commemorative plaques about historical events to large boulders. These boulders—dropped off thousands of years ago by glaciers—have nothing to do with human time yet are pressed into service as sign-posts in public space. The geologic time-scale that they actually document is erased and replaced by decades or mere centuries of human history.
Such boulders are used by geologists who study the planet’s past by “reading” its rocks—what’s called the rock record. These works are a gift to geologists of the future, a memorial to the present moment. They present a record of this epoch in the landscape’s history, when garbage bags were piled along New York City’s curbs and machines made and melted ice, signaling shifts created in the present by humans and eventually legible in the geological record.
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Rock Record # 14, New York City (rock street) | 2022 | adhesive pigment print, framed pigment print | 36 x 48 x 1/2 inches (detail + full view above)
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Rock Record #9, New York City (ice machine) | 2022 | adhesive pigment print, framed pigment print | 80 x 60 x 1/2 inches (detail).
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Rock Record # 9, New York City (ice machine) and Rock Record #17 (recycling), New York City | 2022 | adhesive pigment prints, framed pigment print | 80 x 60 x 1/2 inches and 48 x 64 x 1/2 inches
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Rock Record # 17, New York City (recycling) | 2022 | adhesive pigment prints, framed pigment print | 48 x 64 x 1/2 inches (detail)
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Sketches for Rock Records | 2021-2023 | collaged pigment prints, metallic paper | 12 x 16 inches each
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Sketch for Rock Record # 20, New York (woods) | 2022 | collaged pigment prints, metallic paper | 16 x 12 inches
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Sketch for Rock Record # 25, New York City (tree trunks) | 2023 | collaged pigment prints, metallic paper | 16 x 12 inches
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Sketch for Rock Record # 11, New York City (tags) | 2022 | collaged pigment prints, metallic paper | 12 x 16 inches
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Sketch for Rock Record # 12, New York City (street rock) | 2022 | collaged pigment prints, metallic paper | 12 x 16 inches
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Sketch for Rock Record # 6, New York City (ice sheet) | 2021 | collaged pigment prints, metallic paper | 12 x 16 inches
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Rock Record #16, New York City, Rock Record #15, New York City, and Sketch for Rock Record #6, New York City | 2022 | adhesive pigment prints with framed pigment prints, garbage bag | 80 x 110 x 12 inches; 24 x 32 x 1/2 inches; and 12 x 16 inches
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Rock Record #16, New York City | 2022 | adhesive pigment print with framed pigment prints, garbage bag | 80 x 110 x 12 inches (details)
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