Long Division, 2018—2019

The “Long Division” images are built on sequences of square black-and-white medium format negatives. They were scanned, composited, and then printed on heavyweight, archival fine art photo paper. I worked into the prints with charcoal, graphite, and metallic crayon to formulate a statement that is both a physical description of space and place, and an existential experience of the same.

After coming to Pittsburgh twenty-five years ago, I spent a lot of time photographing some of the less regarded spaces in and around the city. Often these were places that were undergoing a slow process of change, from one state to another, such as hillsides that were once neighborhoods and now were slowly disappearing under a tangle of vine-laden trees, or in the case of these images, a park that was undergoing a watershed renovation. Wandering around with my camera was as much a philosophical exploration as a physical one. After some years this had resulted in a considerable archive of negatives that were never quite enough when printed as individual photographs.

In 2019, after more than a decade and a half of creating and exhibiting purely photographic work I returned to this collection of negatives and started piecing them together to make images that could act as sites for intervention with drawing. Although I had photographed with the intention of making every frame a complete and individual composition, it was when I joined them together that the missing piece fell into place. The photographs of Nine Mile Run taken in 2005, in the early stages of the Watershed Regeneration Project, provided the ground for the figure of a wall. This architectural form was a way of animating the volume of the physical space within the scene. At the same time, it has a particular resonance for me as an expression of existential anxiety in this time of upheaval: a truly liminal place.

Image sizes from left to right:
38.5” x 31”
36” x 19.5”
35” x 27.5”
36” x 20.25”
34” x 17.5”.