Caleb Churchill

The Era of Hopeful Monsters | Our environment as it appears to us in photographs is translated as landscape, a landscape that is transformed, altered and romanticized by American culture. Despite a desire for the unspoiled ideal of the American landscape that prompted the founding of the National Park system, our human need to organize, facilitate and take ownership, has become the geographical reality.

The Era of Hopeful Monsters takes a critical an empathetic look at how we envision our collective identify in relationship to our environment, whether it is the constructed, inorganic urban, the vast expanses of our few remaining wild spaces or, as is most often the case, somewhere in between, a geography that is a mix of concrete and wildflowers. This body of work finds the beauty, the humor and the bittersweet in our contemporary environment, taking in each one for what it is and what it says about our species. www.calebchurchill.com