It is commonly understood that our standard nine to five workday developed to take strategic advantage of the sun's free light. Humans are diurnal meaning we have a biological tendency to be most active during daylight hours. I believe, however, that commuters in large cities have begun to misunderstand our relationship with the sun. Somewhere along the line, the direction of this ancient cause and effect relationship flipped. The commute is now a more substantial and concrete phenomena than the arrival of daylight. The appearance of the sun is merely another detail of the business day. In effect, the reason the sun arrives at all is to light the city so that business can proceed. I suspect that if the sun didn't rise one busy Monday morning for some unexplained celestial reason, the commute would progress on schedule with little or no significant disruption--the street lamps, with their light sensitive on/off switches, would simply stay on indefinitely. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to suggest that individuals in certain environments are wired more directly to their digital clocks then to the rotation of the earth.

In looking for places where evidence of this shift might be found, I turned to the Internet. The constant stream of images coming from the web's global network of traffic cameras has proven an excellent provider of source material for investigating such phenomena. I find the two transitional periods in the diurnal cycle (sunset/sunrise) to be the most tangible and therefore work with still images and streaming video displaying mostly twilight periods.

The Internet content I collect, disassemble and re assembled practically begs the viewer to construct and impose narrative. Since many of the images fall under the category of transportation, there is a sense that loosely defined characters are moving between two unspecified locations: traversing space and time. I am interested in how this search for a plausible narrative can also involve a movement in the viewer's mind. One aspect of my work involves exercising a certain degree of control over the trajectory of that movement through mental space. Whether they shift between the present and a specific memory or between two projections of the future, it is a parallel linear movement the work has the potential to activate.

In addition to crossing mental space, I would like to raise certain doubts in the mind of the viewer. I believe that by exposing the strangeness inherent in how we think about and engage with our built environment, a paradigm shift may be induced. Recently, this has been accomplished by removing a single element from a set of images representing an urban environment. I've found that the presence of certain objects, cars for example, are to taken for granted in such landscapes that their disappearance hits the viewer with jarring awkwardness. Ideally, such a feeling would transform the viewer's understanding of the objects that comprise our modern habitats by bringing into question their continued viability. I'd like for individuals to see these objects (cars, buildings, roads) as transitory instead of projecting their existence indefinitely into the future. If someone sees something as already belonging to the vanished, their grip on that something will loosen and they'll be one step closer to living in a reality-based world. There is a grounding effect in this type of thinking that allows one to more clearly see what might come next.