Christina Dixcy: Statement

My interest in landscape focuses on space, literal and emotional. My primary explorations have been of the American West, inspired by the complicated junctions between the ideal of this landscape as it is presented to us when we are young, our nation’s complex interaction with that mythology, and the very real power one often feels when experiencing the landscape firsthand. More recently, I have been shooting closer to home--the East Coast--finding my horizons on the Atlantic Ocean and Cape Cod Bay.

My background as a painter and printmaker informs my photographic process. I now print digitally, but I still shoot with film because I want the element of surprise film offers. I choose images that operate visually on an iconic (or, at least, familiar) level and shoot and print them with an exposure that I hope hovers between the photographic and painterly. I do not wish to create photographic documents of places nor fully digested, subjective impressions. I place my photographs somewhere in between, creating an experience of place for the viewer. While I want to project my own personal vision of the landscape toward the viewer, more important to me is the viewer’s own connection to the experience—be it alien or familiar.