A constellation of abandoned farmhouses are scattered unremittingly across the barren land of the Icelandic countryside, where the impoverished stretch of arid terrain has forced families to forsaken their homes.

How will history judge us? Over the past several centuries, humanity has raked the land of its resources, threatening the balance of the natural world. The nature of the earnings that define late capitalism have incidentally raped us of nature itself. Contemplation of the future is lost in the inundation of illusory pleasures and distractions pioneered by the media. The excess and pollution we produce mirrors our own social and spiritual decay. Mankind faces a time of impending consequence stemming from decades of disregard for the world in which we live. www.samheydt.com

Harm here is here there. In the throw-away culture of America, a landfill serves as a haunting metaphor for the postindustrial dilemma. It is a locus of decay, the residual of systemic greed and excess, a politically layered sites where relics from our past rot. The accelerating rate products are consumed, replaced, burned up and thrown out put an inexplicable strain on the environment. The illusion hinging happiness on consumption has consequences that manifest in toxic mountains shielded from public view. This ignorance is no longer a haven to bliss, but rather a threat to sustainability. In addressing America's culture of waste, I conflate the catalyst to consumption with its residual through mounting the images of landfills on light-boxes to stylistically mimic advertisements. Through this de-contextualization, one hopes to generate a sense of social consciousness around the cultural phenomenology of consumerism.

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Disney as culture is the opposite of culture as destiny. Landscapes have become commodified and packaged as consumable experiences. The self containerization of nature is a reflection of our increasing alienation from it. Beauty, preservation, development, exploitation, regulation: these are historical matters in flux, not essential conditions of landscape. This body of work is in response to man’s transformation of the natural environment into paved paths and manicured lawns. In its relentless commercialization, the symbolic capital of heritage sites are estranged from their singularity, homogenized and diluted in their commodification.

Ukiyo-e  (浮世絵, Japanese: [u.ki.jo.e] :  pictures of the floating world

The vices of the first world are the burden of the third. Globalization has moved forward unevenly and no-one can say where this "New Frontier" is leading us. Over the past thirty years, we have witness the relationship between capital and labor growing increasingly estranged, and living standards falling with the deindustrialization and the outsourcing of labor to less developed nations. These material inequalities are symptoms of a world reduced to the bottom line, one defined by patterns of peace and war, material inequalities and transnational divisions of labour handicapped by its own historical/institutional (dis)placement. The violence of globalization is both economic and cultural. In integrating the singularity of forms (languages, culture, etc) within a culture of difference, the universal is bound to reject and marginalize.

All transcendence has disappeared, the natural world has been liquidated and substituted for an artificial one. After surveying consumerism and its sequel, the landfill, the price of production became of paramount interest. A direct threat to sacred landscapes, historical infrastructures, natural landmarks and topography, the environmental impacts of mining are large-scale and permanent. Although multinationals insist that the technologies in place ensure environmentally friendly practices, evidence proves otherwise. The deposition and leaching of toxic chemical such as arsenic and nitrogen contaminate local water supplies, poisoning its inhabitants and disrupting the entire ecosystem. As the landscape grows silent, wake up, the stakes are high with there being no end in sight for industrial expansion. 

As the technical age cannibalizes the medium, contemporary photography oscillates from being an “archival medium” to a self-aware one. There are endless representations of a single moment which complicate the veracity of a single photograph. The relation of the spectator to spectacle is an intricately gendered system: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. Women come to define themselves according to how they feel they are perceived. A dialectic between the voyeur and the subjective- a photograph often unveils more about the photographer than the subject. This body of work speaks to the pluralities of experience, the complexities of shifting subjectivities and the absence of authorship- it is about misguided gazes, sex, loss and acceptance.

The life of a ballerina. 

History reveals itself in the details. 

Inscriptions and visual articulations of the past -  temporally estranged, yet spatially layered - are collectively inscribed on the walls and streets of metropolis’ worldwide revealing an overseen system of meaning and a new form of ethnography.  Informed by the constant transformative relationship between past and present, the notion of historicity is explored here through the compulsive archiving of transnational terrain.  Formulaically framed, this documentation provides a visual field study of the socio-economics, politics, diet and beliefs systems of disparate times and places — on one hand reflecting the undifferentiated society of the globalized world, while also revealing the cultural historicity connected to each.