‘Transience’ is a set of twenty individual oil paintings on mylar, inspired by and based on personal family snapshots from the 1960s-1980s, removing not only the people, but also nearly all structures and evidence of a human footprint. The items that remain include religious monuments, fence posts, and pavement, much as how civilizations are glimpsed in the landscape after significant time has passed. The size, shape, and palette of each painting was chosen to emulate the fading of photographic pigments from age or storage conditions. They depict the everyday views that often end up in the backs of photographs; secondary, strangely oriented, and sometimes forgotten.
The work is a consideration of what remains when we are gone, as well as a meditation on absence and time, both in the past and during our current circumstances. Several of the people in the original photographs have already passed, and the rest will eventually, myself included. Do we maintain connection with or feel the presence of those we do not see? Are the memories of people imprinted on the land? The landscape as well, has changed. Many of these trees and flowers and shrubs no longer exist. They are the echoes of landscapes that may no longer remember the essence and emotions of the lives that traveled through them. We are transitory, and there is beauty.
