“The World We Live In” is an ongoing series assembled from found material and photos. With each installment, graphic fragments are cut and rearranged, often several times over, to create forms resembling dilapidated billboards, barricades, and buildings. These architectural structures inhabit the immediate foreground within scenes of wilderness and pastoral countryside. Each of these 10” x 8” images originates as a point of reference within a pre-existing book as well as a two-dimensional representation of a specific location somewhere in the larger physical world. Once the page is removed, though, so too is its original context. The information that remains is reduced even further by the tight confines of the cropped photo and the process of crowding out what little glimpses we have of that landscape. These anonymous places are no longer of specific geographic or cultural importance, but a commonly held “anywhere.” Location and sense of place remains to be intuited by the viewer.

The name of the series is borrowed from a photo / reference book originally published by Time Life in 1955. With its all-encompassing title, the original publication presented itself as an illustrated compendium of the physical world, as it was understood at that particular time.