Believe You Me images Idylls images		Is this heaven or is this hell? I ask myself, am I a cynic or a romantic? Are these parodies of perfection? Are they, as Philip Larkin asks, "a mirage or a miracle... a sham or a sign?" I am walking this fence, straddling this line, teetering between these poles, embracing both. After mixing observation and invention in series of landscape etchings and moody charcoal drawings, I started building models, gradeschool-style: crudely-constructed cardboard houses, felt, and twigs stuck in play-do. Can blatantly fake landscapes simulate the sublime? In the series Believe You Me my photographic images reference the Romantic landscape tradition as color and light infuse a deep space with grandeur and majesty. Tiny characters create a sense of scale and a hint of narrative. Tourist photography, stereoscope and View-master, and conventions of landscape are at play in my mind as I work. Issues of the "real" raised by the language of photography are countered and complicated by artificial materials and by digital manipulation. Systems of belief and representation are called into question. In the series Idylls, I take the character of the bird out into a real space to start the image. Then I amplify, exaggerate, and perfect this vision into the realm of the subtly impossible. In my moving image Garden, we drift through a topiary garden in dreamy, brilliantly-hued half light; created entirely using digital tools, the landscape is completely synthetic and the beauty completely constructed. My scenes are built or arranged, photographed, then adjusted digitally. The final product -- archival pigment inkjet prints on Crane Museo Silver Rag paper.