Cropping to Circles

A mechanical marvel, Central Pivot Irrigation Systems deliver water to otherwise dry lands and food to an otherwise hungry planet. With outstretched steel arms, these wheeled giants twirl slow-motion pirouettes of simulated rainfall pumping atomized sprays from groundwater reserves far below the surface.

As an outgrowth of the “Green Revolution,” center pivot irrigation is a system that encircles multiple conflicting truths—a worldwide revolution in food production is also complicit in the depletion of groundwater; humanitarian aid aligns with hegemonic order; global market forces allow and deny local economies; a system simultaneously produces and diminishes.

These structures, chasing their own tails, morph into lumbering memento mori and echo our own existence rotating through the repetitive rhythms and cycles of life.

Minimal signifiers amplify ambiguities, create associations, and stretch the legibility of representation. Vacillating between the familiar and the fictitious, the work reveals little of the subject’s true spatial immensity, nor the monumental investment represented.

Viewed through the particulars of place, this project is an inquiry into circular arguments, the fluidity of truths encircled by a framework, and the cyclical acceptance and rejection of those truths. It is also an invitation to consider an open-endedness found in the budding potential revealed in the random marks and blank spaces of the prints. Shifting with time, these breaks from conformity illuminate the continual shifts in the topographies of possibilities.

Photographed in the icy reaches of upper Midwest, this series of photographs are an exploration of the complex relationship northerners have with winter. This project was part observation as a newcomer to the region, but also one intended to play with the tension between object-condition relationships.

For those of us who live within the upper-Midwest snow belt, winter can be a long struggle: fighting the snow, fighting the inertia, and fighting the hopeless isolation that comes with the frozen overlay. Like their human counterparts the vestiges of summer stand knee deep in snow.