On The Grid was a collaborative photography and mapping project with photographer Adam Ryder, completed in 2008. We explored the landscape immediately surrounding high-tension electric transmission lines in Rhode Island, spending several days walking along this arterial infrastructure. This, along with Tours and Detours, was the beginning of my practice-led visual research on landscapes of infrastructure. Sites were selected through surveying publicly available aerial photographs and land use maps, and all photos were geo-tagged with handheld GPS units and then mapped. The titles of all images were their latitude-longitude coordinates. In combining the rigid technological process of digital mapping with the subjective practice of landscape photography, this project presented Rhode Island as a collection of differentiated spaces that, though seemingly isolated, are networked.
On The Grid was funded with a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and exhibited at Stairwell Gallery in Providence, Rhode Island in January, 2009. It was featured on the National Public Radio program Living On Earth. For some selected press publications on this project, see the Press/Bibliography section.
