Sirens

Ukiyo-e Moderne in Las Vegas

Acting as my own chauffeur, I cruised the Las Vegas Strip and surrounding neighborhoods, shooting with a slow shutter in blur-mo panning styles honed over many years.

The photographs are articulated through an expanded color palette keyed to the image content. The stretched and drawn-out details of architecture, cars and people express the explosion of frenetic energies that epitomizes Las Vegas. Streaks of light are analogous to musical notation and intonation: alluring Siren-songs drawn across the image plane of glittering possibilities.

Las Vegas is known for periodically imploding the past in order to reinvent itself. The Sands, the Dunes – addresses of the Rat Pack era – were dropped in their tracks decades ago. New palaces were built, which, over time, are replaced by still grander edifices. And so the cycle continues. Like the seemingly omnipresent wrecking ball, these Siren-song images implode the city's facades photographically, creating effects that are simultaneously exuberant, dreamlike and disorienting – the distilled essence of Las Vegas, itself.