Fauxliage
During the COVID-19 pandemic, my husband Tony and I went on day trips to photograph cell phone towers and sites of industrial abuse or neglect. Using my father’s Rolleiflex and Pentax cameras, I have been photographing cell tower trees and making photopolymer gravure plates from the scanned negatives. For the Fauxliage series the analog source and the formal beauty of the ink on paper presents an idealized tree, not the reality of modern stagecraft using plastic and metal. Hand water colored, it evokes a romantic view of human needs altering the landscape, a new icon of our times. I have been thinking about metadata mining, how our patterns of behavior are collected and sold. Cell towers camouflaged as trees exemplify our need for the convenience of internet service everywhere, but our desire for the infrastructure to be hidden. Camouflaged to blend in, the cell tower trees are silent witnesses to our lives.
Photopolymer gravure and watercolor on Rives BFK. 15" x 11" Edition of 5.