My 2007 artist book Place explores the contextual power of authority and language. Within the tradition of Natural History, artists and scientists working together have somehow acquired license to create collages of fact and fiction. The resulting depictions — when viewed through the alluring lens of scientific nomenclature and technical drawing and bundled up in the authority of a collection — create the illusion of fact. Place probes this relationship between curators of the unknown and their eager-to-believe audiences by creating truly fantastic dioramas of the wild. In Place, I crafted windows into deliciously sensational worlds of impossible habitats veiled in scientific language and diagrams and presented as authority. The result is an intermingling of fact and fiction stimulating the imagination of the viewer and, ultimately, an impetus to wonder — liberally.
