After Krieghoff

After Krieghoff is intended as an access-to-the-process preview of a larger project. The works included here represent summer with a still image, and winter with a video loop, as well as stereoscopic renderings of twelve Krieghoff paintings and the faded nylon toque that I placed on the trees in summer 2016.

The photomontage imagery in this video combines my own photographs of landscapes and objects with painted skies appropriated from Krieghoff. The moose coming into the video landscape is a photograph of a plastic toy designed in Germany and made in China. I planted the spruce portrayed in the photo installation in 2000. The tree dons the toque that I knitted with nylon rope (also part of this installation), and that was red in summer 2016 and bleached over the seasons. The photograph also features a Krieghoff sky.

The project responds to the ambiguity of the photographic record, adjusting the landscape much like Krieghoff did through genre painting. My goal is to ruminate on perceptions of place, on objects subject to change, on rendered reality, notions of veracity, staged moments, authenticity and appropriation, as well as on the ecology of forest management. I intend the imagery to build on the anxieties of romanticism, the effect of industrialization on the natural and social environment, and to resonate with current sentiments at a time of accelerated change to our mode of production. The project furthers my exploration of the intersections between culture and nature, seeking a common visual ground in blurred fields between images borrowed from art history, nature photography, craft and technology.