from the ground up

In Lewis Carroll’s book Through the Looking Glass, Alice finds a world that is familiar, and yet not quite right. After reading a poem in the looking-glass world, she notes: `Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas -- only I don't exactly know what they are!’ Seeing something we don’t quite understand gets us thinking.

People stare as I kneel in puddles with a tripod-mounted camera pointing at the ground. I am staring too, but at the shapes and tones and textures in my looking-glass world. This world is in a city. That’s where I live. It’s a place in which almost every square inch has been utilized for some human purpose. A landscape made from the earth, its ingredients ground up, separated and reconfigured to form a new environment. In From the Ground Up I use reflections to explore this environment, looking down to see what’s up. By keeping both the ground and the reflection in focus, the city is shown as a multi-layered place. In the digital darkroom the images have been flipped vertically, transporting us, like Alice, into the looking-glass world.

In its initial phase, this project focused on the center of Chicago, an area within walking distance of where I live. This led to the series Chicago through the Looking Glass which was exhibited in 2016. The present project, From the Ground Up, grew from this earlier phase and has been exhibited in 2017.