Family Alchemy & Chronologia

Family Alchemy, Writing Stories with Light is a wallpaper, sculpture, and photographic installation. For visitors, I have cataloged the history of the cameras I own and have used to document subjects around the world, including South America, Africa, Russia, Eastern and Western Europe, the U.K., Iceland, and perhaps most profoundly, my own backyard. Each waterproof satin wallpaper roll is 24” x 82”, printed with images from a collection of family portraits dating back to the Civil War. The exhibit includes a “hologram” of an autographic camera from 1914, a scan of my brain, and an iPhone “selfie”. I re-built a stereographic viewer, made 3D stereo cards and a pinhole camera, created a 3D digital model of a landscape and a giant Tri-X roll of film, all celebrating the evolution of the camera and how we record our lives. View the PDF here.

Chronologia is a retrospective exhibit, presented in the same space where I previously taught at Carleton College, in Northfield, MN, a sampling of my installation-based artistic practice. I have long sought the poetic intersections of history, science, and art. Looking closely, I found new connections and new meanings, or old meanings long hidden in familiar things. I explored themes such as our love and mimicry of nature, the imprint of technology on human relationships, and the taming of biology through language. It was a joy to collaborate with faculty and staff across the campus from physics, geology, history, biology, cinema, media studies, and more.

My first day of teaching at Carleton was September 11, 2001, and I was instantly reminded that my elaborate lesson plans were not the purpose of being an educator. Instead, teaching is connecting. I listened to my students and together we faced what must be faced, whether terrorist attacks, injustice, or pandemics, and we explored how to best develop their imaginations. One student from that first course went on to pursue his own work, only to return later to the college to teach photography during the COVID-19 pandemic. I started my career here at Carleton during one turbulent moment, and it ended during another – the worldwide pandemic.

As an educator, I designed new analog and digital photography classes for my students, introduced materials and techniques, and invited both traditional and contemporary visiting artists to lecture. In my teaching, I emphasized the relationship between technique and the emotional impact of image-making. That technology should support content and concept. Students learned how to decide if a vantage point was opportunistic or compassionate and how manipulating the depth-of-field (the distance between the closest and farthest objects in a photo) could alter the facts. Under the amber light of the darkroom, with magic and gratitude, they turned flat sheets of silver-coated, light-sensitive paper into photographs that could be read by the heart as well as the mind. The classroom was only a starting point; I took students to Hawaii, where we swam at night with underwater cameras trained on manta rays, to Ireland in its green summer or Yellowstone in its white winter.

This exhibition integrates my work as a professor and as an artist.