american mythologies

American Mythologies is an ongoing photographic series that stages theatrical gestures within remote American landscapes. At its visual core are freestanding red curtains—proscenium fragments temporarily erected in fields, deserts, forests, swamps, and mountains. Removed from architecture, they stand alone against vast terrain, transforming open land into spectacle.

The curtain is both invitation and obstruction. It promises revelation while withholding it, marking the boundary between audience and performance, fiction and reality. Placed directly within the landscape, this emblem of theatre collapses those categories. The American wilderness—often mythologized as pure and foundational—is reframed as stage. The gesture is intentionally absurd and grandiose, echoing a culture that elevates spectacle as a primary mode of experience.

The work considers a national condition in which attention is perpetually redirected toward mediated dramas—sports broadcasts, algorithmic feeds, political theatre—while the physical world recedes in the rearview. Even classical theatre, a refined abstraction, remains a diversion from direct experience.

The curtains bifurcate space into seen and unseen, “real” and staged. At times I appear within or behind them; at others I am absent. This oscillation destabilizes authorship and spectatorship: we are performers, audience, and yes—sometimes stagehands, within our own constructed realities.

The series extends through images in which grass is treated as a malleable surface—peeled back, gathered, slept within—as though the earth itself were fabric. These gestures suggest that reality is shaped by intervention and perception; by manipulating the ground beneath our bodies, larger mythologies are revealed to be contingent constructions.

In Under the Rug, an oriental carpet smothers my nude body in a field, evoking the suffocating weight of inherited culture and the urge to conceal the body, and to seek shelter. The landscape remains stoic and indifferent—an essential part of the myth.