*In the Mist of a Great Fall*, 2023, Oliva Gallery, Chicago, IL

With these paintings, I’ve broadened the scope of my recent work, informed by environments of the Great Lakes, to include the falls at Niagara. These large-scale abstractions, rooted in observation and in place, assay tone and the prismatic color spectrum. Moreover, they disrupt the idea that landscape, as such, is static, even material. Indeed, the supposed permanence of landscape here becomes an opalescent memorial to a world continually undone by geologic forces: plate tectonics, volcanism, earthquakes, glaciation, erosion, sedimentation—and in just the last two hundred years—the gradual accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide due to the anthropogenic burning of fossil hydrocarbons. In these processes of decrease and increase, of dissipation and concentration, and transformations by repeated subtraction and addition, I see an analogue to the act of painting itself. As I embrace the challenge of interpreting what was once seen as the quintessential subject of American landscape painting, these diaphanous curtains of pigment and light test the very limits of the genre and its conventions.