Across cultures and centuries, the forest has occupied a unique place in our collective imagination. Light and dark, good and evil, chaos and peace, body and soul: these oppositions are as fundamental to the forest’s liminal landscape as they are to the human experience. There are countless histories and myths that involve humankind venturing beyond the structured limits of civilization into the chaotic labyrinth of the woods.
In myth, forests are often seen as the ultimate life source, related as they are to so many of man’s genesis stories, and the origins of Sylvania are actually very tied to my personal origins. Though I was born and raised in Washington, DC, I was conceived in Washington State—on the heavily forested San Juan Islands. Having never been to the Pacific Northwest, I felt a compulsion to go to the place where I began life and the conviction that if I did I would surely find something there. What I found was the forest, and an intense sense of contentment and enchantment that seemed almost foreign to me and harkened back to a more childish or primitive capacity to indulge the imagination.
Like so many before me, I went into the woods hoping to find adventure, transcendence, the unknown. While I am not totally out of the woods yet, I have returned from one year of arboreal outings with Sylvania— a composite “forest-land” of photographs comprising scenes from various and sundry American woodlands. Through images of both real and depicted nature, Sylvania examines the differing characteristics of these woods while also seeking the Forest Universal rooted in them all; it explore both the fanciful and the real-world magic of the forest, and its metaphoric and physical presence today.