BIRDS, BEASTS & BEACH TRASH
We are not alone. We may not know or often think about it when we’re at the beach or dining in one of our great restaurants, but we still share this beautiful peninsula with some of the abundant wildlife that the pilgrims encountered (and often ate) so long ago. Coyotes, foxes, and deer still flourish here, along with a variety of smaller creatures and our wealth of native and migratory birds.
Not long after my wife and I bought our second home here, I began exploring the fringes of this world, on our hikes, of course, but also through photography, not just with conventional cameras but using inexpensive motion-activated cameras. These “robo-cams” have picked up some pretty amazing photos of the deer, coyotes, and other wildlife that pass through our yard and down-slope through the woods, when we’re absent or asleep. Our walks have also enabled my wife to pursue her obsession with snowy owls, accounting for their several appearances in this show.
Our beach walks have also yielded an abundance of bait bags, driftwood, and other colorful debris, which have found their way into random sculptures—an effort to justify my habit of dragging this stuff home . Over the years, Emily and I have also made several forays into the American west, inspiring a number of the photographs in this show.
For background: I was, for many years, a documentary filmmaker and owner of a small independent production and distribution company, Fanlight Productions, which handled over 400 titles dealing with healthcare, parenting, homelessness, and disability issues. Many of my own films were festival award-winners, including the Oscar-nominated documentary Code Gray about ethical dilemmas in nursing, which I co-produced with Joan Sawyer in collaboration with nurse-ethicist Christine Mitchell. My most recent film, Refuge: Caring for Survivors of Torture, documents the difficulties faced by immigrant survivors of torture now living in the United States.
As our friends are aware, I am experiencing some degree of memory loss these days, which makes the exercise of pulling together this show and being able to share these memories and images with you especially meaningful for me.
