These images began as optical play, a trompe l’oeil I carried out in my basement. It’s an eerie space, devoid of much else beside a network of pipes and the craggy stones that make up the foundation. Someone at some point painted the stones gray to look like they are part of the floor. Massive, hulking boulders rise out of the flat cement, fooling no one.

This nowhere space invited me to toy with scale, to imagine the big rocks as cliffs. The camera blurs truth and fiction by what it reveals and obscures. This visual experiment, at first merely playful, began to pose more serious questions about the fuzzy boundaries between reality and artificiality. How far can images take us before they replace the real, especially in the time of artificial intelligence?

In this series, I create a simulation of a day as it passes, from dawn to dusk, across various fabricated landscapes. I blend photographs taken at ground level of natural and humanmade terrain with digitally created backdrops, collapsing any sense of scale or origin. What results are illusions of grand vistas and grassy knolls that pause just short of becoming fully convincing. Through this project, I consider the ongoing erosion of our ecosystems and a social milieu steeped in the unreal. What happens when natural spaces are no longer accessible? In the virtual era, do we still need the “real thing?”