In surveying, the operation of sighting on distant points to locate one's own position is called resection. My work springs from an effort to fix myself within the shifting complexity of the modern landscape by focusing on existing landmarks, or creating new ones of my own. Each new artwork provides an additional bearing on the map I am constructing of my place in the world. My earlier works were motivated largely by a desire to integrate within my art practice several vaguely conceived but closely held environmental concerns, concepts like "land" and "wilderness." In From Albany to the Adirondacks (2002), I imagined a dashed line from my new location, my studio, to a distant peak in the mountains. Soil collected from each "dash" on the line was transplanted to a re-engineered filing cabinet outfitted with a complex lighting and watering system to maintain the growing samples, along with captioned photographs and maps to provide context. All of these elements together created a record of the mental strategies (mapping, photographing, collecting, organizing, labeling) I used to try to find a connection with this environment. In later projects I continued to explore this conflicted relationship between the perceived environment and various mediating systems and technologies. Inevitably the use of such systems (maps, models, photographs and video) introduces a certain distance into the experience of place. Yet it seems to me to accurately reflect my own perceptions of the world, which have since childhood always been accompanied by the captions, diagrams, illustrations and documentaries of a culture obsessed with every kind of representation. Looking Out II (2004) was an installation that engaged the internet as a kind of map ghosted on the physical landscape. Thirty-seven live streaming views from the borders of the country were projected on the interior walls of a 15' x 15' room, creating a real-time video panorama. Due to the diverse nature of the surveyed sites, the framed views are updated at distinctly different rates, from jerky video to minutes-long stills. The viewer is reminded of the technology underlying this x-ray vision, reminded of his physical presence in this place, at this time; while surf crashes on the Pacific coast and a truck crawls slowly across the Canadian border. Here the physical isolation of the viewer from the represented landscape is complete, but perception is expanded to the farthest horizon. My most recent work continues to explore the changing conceptions of place inspired by vision that is at once extended and redefined by cultural tools both old and new.