Electric Desert

Electric Desert is a series of digital collages meant to capture fleeting moments in the landscapes of the southwestern United States. Moments at once familiar and subtly surreal. Each piece invites you, the viewer, into a sliver of time: the hush just after golden hour, when a monsoon cloud still glows with the sun’s last warm shimmer, or the brief glimpse of a roadrunner crossing the desert.

These compositions layer reality with suggestion, inviting the viewer to sense what’s typically just outside of regular visual perception - an atmosphere charged with unseen energy, a palette that vibrates just beyond nature’s own spectrum. I’ve tried to capture landscapes that straddle the tangible and the esoteric, places where the physical and energetic realms touch.

These pieces were created with digital tools such as a PC computer, iPad, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Fresco. But Electric Desert draws on the textures and processes of traditional printmaking, echoing block prints and etched lines. This blending of visual techniques is deliberate, melding the timeless and the contemporary, the grounded and the uncanny. The subtle differences in technique within the compositions were a deliberate choice, aiding the concept that each component in life stands on it’s own - landscape, animal, sky… each are their own elements in nature just as they are in these compositions, but similarly, require each other to make a whole.

At it’s core this series was created and is still evolving as my way of processing the past several decades of growing up in the desert, then working with the people, wildlife, and plants that make these iconic lands what they are. They draw from experiences both explainable and that defy current scientific explanation. It’s my hope that you as the viewer can feel these pieces as much as appreciate their aesthetics.