Mars, Excerpts of a Poem by Percival Lowell

"One voyage there is I fain would take
While yet a man in the moral make;
Voyage beyond the compassed bound
Our our own Earth's returning round:
Voyage whose shining goal by day
From stupid stare lies hid away
Amid the sun-dimmed depths of space...
But when staid night reclaims her sphere
And the beshadowed atmosphere
It shutters to sign once more unbars,
Letting the universe appear
With all its wonder-world of stars,
My far-off goal draws strangely near,
Luring imagination on,
Beckoning body to be gone --
To ruddy-Earthed, blue-oceaned Mars

So like yet so unlike our Earth

On waterless waste from pole to pole,
A planet corpse, whence has sped the soul.

Already far on with advancing age,
Has it passed its life-bearing stage?
And has that spirit already fled
From that planet of war, once doubtless rife
With myriad forms of happy life
Waging natural selection's strife--
But are the survivors themselves all dead?
Or is Mars yet inhabited?"

Cold, Red and Dead (2016 - )

The planet Mars is where we have projected onto our scientific hopes, fantasies and desires. The place scientists once thought was a cold dead rock is quickly becoming a destination where life could flourish and humans could colonize.

Through the use of simulated 3D images and photographs, I am exploring how the identity of a landscape is constructed through images. Photographs taken of the Martian terrain act as evidence of a place that we have yet to truly step foot on and experience; an imagined place that we have built a persona for. The photographs I create act as reinterpretations and representations of this multiplicity of imagery from the red planet; attempting to question and convolute the imagined, the tangible, and our perception of Mars. We construct this ideal of Mars to fuel our ambition that life that is not limited to being on Earth and that maybe one day soon, this foreign land could be ours.