Commuting back and forth from Denver to my suburban home, I saw a shredded sheet of industrial plastic caught on a section of barbed wire fence blowing in the wind. In the long, flat plain of my drive, I couldn’t stop watching the flapping and gyrating sections as they caught the sunlight. It made me think of streamers, dancing to the rhythm of the wind’s creation. It was beautiful. Then I immediately felt a pang of regret and as I continued to drive, it struck me how many more examples of this same phenomenon I saw, coordinated in their dance even though they were anchored to the rusted barbs. Capturing both the beautiful and the tragic, I began to photograph moments of plastic billowing in the breeze like performance art gone wrong, before detaching and collecting the debris for disposal. Over the course of the last few years, my fascination with the artificial choreography has only continued and I’ve collected thousands of photos along with the shreds of plastic along roadsides and highways. With this project, I want my viewers to experience the same sensation that I did: feeling both wonder and unease in the same moment and then awareness as they begin to take notice of the fence art in their part of the world.
