The pandemic prevented me from making my annual photographic pilgrimage to the natural springs of the Northern Rocky Mountains. Stuck at home, I turned to a source of water a little bit closer -- my fifty-year-old pool. The patterns formed by the circulation jets function as a stand-in for the natural water surface distortion and ripples I usually photograph. My show, Stuck, is a unique, often playful, chronicle of a disrupted life, a deserted downtown, and how stuck we, as individuals, remain as our society ripples and shifts.

One suite of images began with a simple desire to create a still life using persimmons ripening in my backyard. With a glance at the ripples near the pool jets and around thirty dollars in quarters to sink the fruit, a suite of “not-so-still-life” images was born. I then experimented with immersing earlier photographs of mountain springs, urban Houston, and a Mexican street, creating a “second derivative” set of altered images. Other experiments captured floating leaves, their shadows distorted by the lensing effect of surface tension around their edges, and with forays into downtown Houston a suite of “Office Alien” images utilized the distortion of stressed glass panes in the abandoned offices early in the pandemic.

The common thread? My images are typically impressions or abstractions of the visual landscape, distorted by physical processes that create surprising and fleeting patterns. Videos illustrating how the pool became an artistic playground for my unique style of photography will be on display alongside the work.