Coins for the Crossing

Coins for the Crossing is the end of a project that began in 2001. An early catalog of its landscapes, Dead Desert Night, was printed in limited numbers for a solo show in NY. The portraits, still lives, horizons, painted maps, and ephemera present a quiet and private West. The night bars inhabitants, other than the occasional traveler, spiritualist, rogue border patrol, prostitute, astronomer, or anarchist. Their narratives share the Western act of searching: for solitude, transcendence, new starts, other worlds. The pictures are fascinated with historical tropes, myth, and mortality- uneasy, even unkind, ugly but in love with every forlorn thing. The progress of the book converts anxiety into the color of a sustained fantasy life- one that occupies outposts in the desert's broken reaches.