In the "I Make My Own Weather" body of work, I utilize and expound upon the landscape painting traditions of idealized histories, such as the Hudson River School, Romanticism and the Baroque. The installations act as deconstructed paintings, as though walking through fragments of represented landscapes. In these worlds, synthetic materials masquerade as natural, and the natural as synthetic; a tree root painted epoxy green, an Astro turf tarp in the shape of a pond, a peeling away of a blue sky. Painted and photographic images hang, float, or drape on the floor. 3D objects - a cascading wave, a chunk of earth, jut from the wall. The material confusions in the work reveal the facade of the image; the conventional idea of humans as outside the natural world, and nature as pristine and untouched. This ideology is collapsed by the realities of the climate crisis.

Many of these mythic histories served to objectify nature, and support and justify the exploitation of land and people. The paintings depicted America as a vast, open space waiting to be explored, dominated, and settled. They helped to reinforce the notion of Manifest Destiny, which held that it was the divine mission to expand westward regardless of the environmental and human consequences. This work is entangled with these histories, and with current ideas of Postnaturalism; that nature is no longer separate from human culture and technology and that our understanding of the "natural" world is influenced by human intervention: a complex hybrid of the natural and the human-made.

These installations indulge the beauty of the depicted landscape, side by side with its own shattered mythology. If a painting is a complete world, this work both embodies that world and points to its falseness.