What can the structures and the environments we create teach us about ourselves? My photographs explore the places of the suburban American landscape on the premise that much can be learned about our culture by examining the environments that we have created and that we tolerate.

These images show our suburban spaces as simply that: space, geometry, design, environment. But underlying these factors are clues to understanding our society and our values. They are spaces, but they are also representations of our efficiency, our consumerism, and our impersonal, regimented lifestyles. They are manifestations of modern American values and are inseparable from our American experience.

If it can be said that the architecture of a culture reflects it's values and it's spirit, what does the strip mall say about our values? What does a Wal-Mart in every town say about our spirit? Are the buildings and structures that identify American mass culture art? Or are they a malignant acne on the face of the country? They are sexlessly reproduced across the landscape and we show little awareness of their impact, their semi-permanence, and how they are experienced. How can we gauge the ways in which living in such uninspired and prefabricated environments affects us as individuals and as communities?

Once these places are abandoned by the companies that created them, emptied of their consumers and their pedestrians, is there anything of value left for the community, or simply an empty Pizza Hut building and a sense of meaninglessness and alienation? Are we a society so efficient and profit-driven that it is is enough to be so simply and coldly utilitarian? Is this all the spirit that we have to reflect? If these are manifestations being coughed up from our collective conscious, should we respond by changing it?

If art is a cultural barometer for where we are, and therefore where we are going....