In 2006 I received a grant from The Joan Mitchell Foundation to document thirty acres of woods in Western Massachusetts prior to its transformation into a subdivision. I wanted to draw and photograph the forest on Minnechoag Mountain in the Pioneer Valley, once painted by Frederick Church and Thomas Cole, before its destruction. And like the Hudson River School painters a century earlier, I believed that I could preserve the woods in pictures, but once the development began, the destruction was so monumental—a complete grading of the hillside and removal of all trees—that the idea of preserving the forest in pictures seemed naive and inadequate.  The hundreds of digital photographs that I took in the forest and the detailed drawings that I made in the studio failed to capture the complexity of even this small patch of woods sandwiched between a housing development and a gravel pit.  The forest appeared only as a scenic backdrop: a flat, seamless space without a focal point. 

To disrupt the continuity of the image and the illusion of an impenetrable forest that it produced, I cut into the photographs by hand using an x-acto knife following the contours of every form. The incised photographs are as much objects, as they are images, with each cut disrupting the illusion of space and revealing the materiality of the photograph itself.  While it takes only a second to take the picture, it takes weeks to cut, and this process yields new information about the plants and trees on the mountain that went unnoticed at first glance. Although this entire process strengthens my understanding of the place, it weakens the actual images. The cut photographs slowly fall apart mirroring the entropy and decay of the woods.

The shapes and textures I observe while altering the photographs then provided material for the graphite drawings of debris that I imagine will eventually slide down the slope of the mountain. The muddled figure and ground relationships in the drawings and the photographs reflect my ambiguity towards the future of this forest that is too small to be wilderness and too big to be a backyard. In this process I find myself both complicit in and reacting against the destruction of the woods. Through this series of works, I would like to open up new ways of thinking about our relationship to the woods just at or before its end.

The mythical forests of Early American literature, from Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter to Thoreau's Walden,have not entirely disappeared, some are retained for their picturesque qualities or as escapes from everyday urban life.  But the forest is ultimately kept at a distance, pushed further and further back, until the woods are just a thin strip between subdivisions: a scenic backdrop, not wilderness. The brighter images in this series were taken at the edge of the forest, a border that changes monthly as new developments spring up in the ex-urbs of Boston.  Once the larger trees have been taken down, the summer sun has a corrosive effect on plants and saplings that once thrived in the shade of tall trees. 

Darkness, on the other hand, indicates a thriving forest with a flush canopy, even though this darkness is, in part, one reason we want to keep the woods at a "safe distance." The darker images in this series are taken from deep inside the woods, completely surrounded by trees.  Darkness in Early American tales about the wilderness of Massachusetts represents all that is unknown about the woods: that which the light of reason did not yet shine upon. 

Artists and scientists alike use the tools of observation from photography to data analysis to reveal the order hidden in nature. Only through objectivity, by removing one's own expectations about how nature worked, can the truth be uncovered, the veil lifted.  Even one's own sensory perceptions can be deceiving: lumen, the light of perception, can mask the truth, so the smells, textures and colors of the world had to be analyzed using lux, the bright light of rational thought. 

Centuries after these two terms emerged the German philosopher Heidegger argued that actually lumen and lux are preceded by another "light" called lichtung which translates literally to "light in a forest clearing." Heidegger observes there is no light in a forest without an opening in the trees; Lichtung is a metaphor for the fundamental openness to the world that precedes experience and also the rational conclusions we draw based on our experience. Heidegger argues that we experience the world around us first before "illumination", or, in other words, before we pass judgment on what we are encountering.

These images are an attempt to describe the experience of being in the woods, not only its appearance. The limits of the camera's ability to capture the woods in either deep darkness or brilliant light reflects on the limits of our understanding of the woods: what remains to be discovered about how the forest works and what we do not yet know about how the world will be impacted by the eventual destruction of those forests.