Constructed Landscapes
Studies in perception, matter, and moving image

These works are studies of my interest in how sound, image, and material form shared systems of perception. Using tabletop setups with cameras, liquids, blue foam, and ceramic clay, I created small-scale environments that unfold like fantastical or microscopic landscapes. These experiments, from single-channel videos to multi-camera installations, translate material processes of decay and sedimentation into perceptual events. Each work explores how feedback, transformation, and observation co-compose meaning within an artificial ecology.



Blue

Single-channel video
Mini-DV

3 min 8 sec

2010
My first “video vista,” Blue constructs a mythic landscape using everyday materials—shampoo waterfalls, clamp-lamp sunrises, and icy tunnels rendered from translucent gels. The work unfolds as a handmade simulation of the natural sublime, performed through modest, domestic means. Its soundscape, composed with a toy keyboard and voice, traces a fragile emotional topography between innocence and adulthood. Blue marks an early gesture toward world-building through material improvisation and mediated observation.



Welcome To Crayon County

Single-channel video
Mini-DV

4 min 4 sec

2010
Welcome to Crayon County was an experimental Video Vista in the form of a tourist promotional video. Crayon County is a psychedelic and disturbing world, one where figure and ground merge into a hybrid kaleidoscopic experience. 



Macaroni and Cheese Dinner Cave

Mixed Media Diorama (pasta, cheese dust, glue, wood, plexiglass, metal scaffold)

8 × 8 × 8 ft

2012
Macaroni Cheese Dinner Cave is an early experiment in constructing synthetic landscapes from everyday materials. The sculpture is built as a windowed diorama resembling a monumental crystal cave, with the interior of this cave being made entirely of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. The work reimagines the landscape as a geologic strata of processed food. Within my larger practice, it marks a formative exploration into how perception, scale, and material excess can transform the ordinary into a surreal and spectacular environment. Using humor and absurdity as entry points, this work foreshadows later investigations into ecological systems, artificial worlds, and the architectures of attention that shape collective experience.



Sunset

Single-Channel Video
4k

2 min 3 sec

2019
Much like Daguerre’s early landscape dioramas, Sunset features light and movement in a translucent, slowly transforming image. A live miniature environment—an illuminated tank of ceramic clay suspended in water—becomes both subject and stage. The clay slip, titled Alfred Lumpy Slip, settles and grows delicate hairlike structures, forming microscopic architectures that resemble mountains, clouds, or cellular beginnings. The piece continues my inquiry into how simple physical reactions can simulate complex ecological systems and perceptual depth.



Gold Coast

Single-Channel Video
HD

5 min 27 sec

Sound by Linkoln

2019
Created during a residency at the Institute for Electronic Arts (Alfred University, NY), Gold Coast is a single-take video composed through a live broadcast mixer using macroscopic camcorder imagery, Dave Jones analog video processing, and distortion software running in Ableton Live. Produced in collaboration with musician Linckoln for their album Dew, the video extends the sonic atmosphere of the record into a visual field where the boundaries between landscape, software, and perception dissolve.

Like earlier works in this series, Gold Coast treats the video apparatus as an instrument and ecosystem. The video signal becomes abstracted through a system that transforms raw material (light, texture, and sound) into shifting, meditative abstractions. The resulting image-world oscillates between the natural and the synthetic, proposing landscape as a state of thought: continuous and becoming.



Panorama

Three Channel Live-Video Projection
Cameras, Fishtank, Clay, Water
Installed in the Alfred University Immersion Gallery

Dimensions Variable

2019

Developed during a residency at Alfred University’s Institute for Electronic Arts, this installation expands the Sunset apparatus into an immersive, multi-camera environment. An array of camcorders observes a fish tank filled with Alfred Lumpy Slip, its shifting textures projected across the gallery walls. The system performs itself—a network of optics, water, clay, and feedback—transforming a tabletop experiment into a distributed perceptual field. This work marks the transition from single-channel landscapes to the ecological and infrastructural installations that define my later practice.