As a long time visual artist, curiosity and exploration have always been my primary motivations.  I earned a Fine Arts degree from California College of the Arts, San Francisco.

Looking back, I see that I have often allowed my inquisitive nature to lead my experiences exploring diverse forms of visual expression:  painting, drawing, print making and both digital and traditional film photography.  My artistic interests have moved from realism to abstraction.  Recently, I’ve used photography to combine realism and abstraction into what I think of as “abstract realism”, images of real objects composed abstractly.

In art school, Camera Lucida, written by the French philosopher Roland Barthes, had a profound effect on me.  Looking through my camera lens, I hope to feel the sudden impact of what Barthes calls punctum, which he defines as “the sensory, intensely subjective effect of a photographic composition on the photographer or viewer.”

For me, the punctum is a very distinct sensation of awareness that lets me know that I have found something of special visual interest that will lead viewers of my photographs to experience a sort of silent message, maybe a surprise or new awareness.  In that way, photography becomes a language without words – a silent, though sometimes impactful, communication between the photographer and the viewer.

Every day, I walk for exercise, mindfully looking at the environment I’m passing through. Walking near an industrial area in Davis, I noticed a collection of very large, mysteriously shaped objects which were completely covered as they rested on rows of wooden pallets in the parking lot outside a factory.  

I moved closer, with my camera in hand, taking dozens of photographs, all the while feeling several delightful shocks of punctum letting me know that I had found a visual gold mine! 

Just then, the factory guard swooped up behind me, shouting STOP!  He demanded that I delete those images from my camera then and there!

In the factory office, I assured them that I wasn’t going to do anything harmful with the photos.  I left my contact information and asked to be called so I could speak with someone in management to tell them what I was doing.

I waited several weeks and never had a response from the factory management.  I decided to go back on a holiday when the place was deserted, and I photographed dozens more images, including the ones in this exhibition.

After printing many of the images from the series of photographs I shot that day, I pinned them up on my studio wall to take a long look.  It was then that I realized that these photographs provide an additional message…beyond the punctum of pleasure I found in the graphic composition of each image.  That message brings attention to the pervasiveness of a useful but harmful material that is having a destructive effect on our environment.

My digital images in this exhibition are for you to enjoy visually, but also to focus awareness on the conflicting aspects of plastic.  Strong and useful, plastic is also toxic and harmful, a blessing and a curse—and it is everywhere, Ubiquitous…the title I have given this series of images.