High Water is an examination of the topography created by two monumental events; the massive, prehistoric Missoula Floods and Washington’s vast irrigation and hydropower complex, the Columbia Basin Project. Through that conceit I engage the history and mythology of the American West, our collective preoccupation with its grandeur, and our conflicting desire to control the natural world.   

Beginning roughly 15,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, the Columbia Plateau of central Washington was inundated by a series of enormous floods that radically transformed the topography of the region. The water drained out of Lake Missoula through a break in a glacial dam and sped across the land in a 500 foot tall surge, leaving a 16,000 square mile network of coulees (dry channels) and scablands (land stripped to bedrock) in its wake.

In 1933, at a bend in the Columbia River, near the north end of the Grand Coulee, construction of the Grand Coulee Dam commenced.  The completed dam is the second largest concrete structure on earth and the centerpiece of the Columbia Basin Project which was a triumph of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The project provides power to much of the west coast and impounds enough water to irrigate 671,000 acres. The dam succeeded in transforming central Washington from arid sage steppe into an agricultural paradise. However, the damming of the Columbia displaced many communities along the river and halted the salmon migration that the Indians of the Colville Reservation had depended upon for millennia.

Two floods, each monumental and catastrophic, separated by 12,000 years.

I am particularly interested in how our understanding of these two phenomena is augmented by considering their relative scale and uncanny superimposition.  Furthermore, I intend to examine how our perception of events is modified by locating natural history and cultural history on the same continuum.

Though my work is not documentary in a strict sense, it contains an underlying documentary component. The photo constructions I create incorporate my own photographs and those I have appropriated from archives at the Grand Coulee Dam and the University of Washington. Computer manipulation of the archival images serves to disrupt their factual veneer and call the objectivity of the “document” into question. By using historical documents within the fabric of my work the final pieces convey both an air of veracity and the subjective. Ultimately, the constructions are meant to suggest how a place feels.