PROJECT STATEMENT:

Spy Pond in Arlington is like an oasis to me, an expanse of open water half hidden in the middle of a suburban town. "Pondwater" is an ongoing project consisting of large-scale photographs, all of the surface of the pond.  

The images are taken with my iPhone, without any additional lenses or filters, and are shown as is, uncropped, and matched as nearly as possible to the colors as they appear on my phone. They are taken on Spy Pond, from my kayak, at the same time of day:  within an hour or two of the sunset. They are photographs of the water without external reference aside from anything that might be floating there.  There is no shore, except as it appears in the reflection.

The photos that make up "Pondwater" are relatively small digital files printed large.  Where crispness and clarity are often the hallmark of nature photography,  here they are replaced by abstraction as the details of the image are expanded.  There's a painterly quality to the enlarged photographs, where each individual color is given its own space.  

The "Pondwater" photos are 45"x60,"  two and a half inches deep.  They are dye sublimation prints, a process originally developed for the fashion industry - water-soluble inks are printed onto transfer paper and then permanently bonded to fabric using a heat press.  They are printed onto poly duck, which has a canvas-like texture, and then stretched over wooden frames.  For me there is a correlation between the surface of the water and the idea of fabric, which is essentially all surface.  It seems fitting, too, that the inks are water soluble.

The images in "Pondwater" are produced in series of five or six, of roughly the same moment, capturing versions of the same phenomenon or circumstance.  They are unique prints and can be viewed individually, but they benefit from each other's company.