Machines

MACHINES is a futuristic photographic narrative influenced by Leo Marx’s theory of “the machine in the garden.” Marx (1919–2022) was an American scholar whose book The Machine in the Garden (1964) traced a scene that keeps returning in American writing: a quiet pastoral moment broken by the whistle of a train. The country dreamed of a peaceful “middle landscape” between wilderness and city, and the industry remaking the land kept interrupting the dream. My images push that middle landscape into the future: a lush, untamed wilderness under the dominion of a mechanized society. Each image fuses traditional color photographs of the American landscape with thrift-store items, industrial machine parts, animals and people.

The form and materiality of the residual trinkets and broken bits of industrial design insinuate a lingering ideology of mass production and rampant consumerism. The well-being of the natural world and of future generations rests on a re-imagined eco-industry capable of transforming our ethical expectations for the machines we use every day. The series asks us to reconsider waste-generating machines and naive habits of consumption.