Faux / Real Horizons.

2025—ongoing.

Thinking about the different colors that the digital sensor creates in response to an object on a white background, I thought I would play with that idea and create images of a strip of white paper with a line of black ink residue—a glitch horizon. I zoomed in on this faux horizon line and adjusted the exposures repeatedly to see what the sensor would pick up. Surprisingly, the images revealed a blue cast.

Through working on this sequence, I began to think about the horizon line. It’s made its presence through much of my work—the actual landscape horizon line. It’s a reference point that I’ve felt necessary to locate myself and the viewer within my abstract work. It is often dead center, like a flat-line. I’m particularly fascinated by how the pinhole camera renders the horizon line and was delighted to receive the following image that shows the natural slight arc.

I started to think about the real horizon vs the fictitious horizon and with much of photography today, the difficulty of figuring out what is real in the first place. Then a certain light in my Chicago apartment rendered a vertical shadow line on my wall. That line became a horizon in my mind and my thought process was playing out in real time. I picked up the digital camera and photographed that line over and over again, as I do, sequentially, playing with exposures. As the light shifted, it even gave me a moon. I’m continuing to contemplate this notion of faux versus real.