Or rather, the irony of the landscape genre. I became obsessed with American Landscape painting when I learned there was a time when the North American landscape was considered hideous by European aesthetics. I'm not referring to American paintings - that's understandable - but to the land itself. It was too grand, too wild, too powerful - a landscape without human hives overrunning it.
Now, in the late 20th century, the paintings of Church and the Hudson River School - thought so brave and brazen at the time - appeared to me as sentimental postcard art. I became very curious about why the majority of the population now loves the Landscape Genre.
The
beginning of this series involved PSEUDOMORPHS, shaped canvases that
were representational when viewed directly while appearing totally
abstract when seen from the side. 
I came up with the idea for these because of working with texture maps
in computer animation. This work made me aware of how a 2D image can be
projected onto a 3D form with wildly varying results.
I began by using found urban debris as the ground for my nature
paintings - abandoned architectural details, wire mesh, rusty crushed
metals, etc.
These pieces intend to poke fun at both Abstract
Expressionism and Landscape Realism as these genres, in the strictest
sense, are not supposed to share the same painted space.
The next ironic investigation was into the world of vacuum-formed plastics. I sculpted elk and collected bark, rocks and twigs and cast them. This allowed me to make really unnatural images of nature which I could paint on or leave as sculptural elements.
In 1988 I won a fellowship to the Banff Center for Fine Arts and was
able to live in the Rocky Mountain landscape of my paintings for the
first time in my life. My experience at the center allowed me to mix the
paintings with video and music and after this time I continued my
Landscape series in the new form of video installations. (See
BADLANDS, The
Desert in the Garden and The Synthetic
Terrarium.)
