TITLE: Unresolved Ground

Across the prairie, the landscape holds a particular tension between exposure and neglect. Distances stretch without interruption, structures remain long after their purpose has dissolved, and entire environments exist at the edge of occupation without ever separating from it.

This series moves through ghost towns, industrial remnants, abandoned spaces, sand hills, and open terrain where systems of use and permanence have weakened or failed to take hold entirely. In these spaces, the landscape is encountered less through function than through presence. Attention shifts toward subtle traces, unresolved atmospheres, and moments where the environment feels psychologically charged despite the absence of visible activity.

Photographed as one might approach a portrait, the work does not attempt to define these places, but to remain with them long enough for tension, familiarity, estrangement, and narrative possibility to surface simultaneously.

The prairie remains open in a way few environments do. Its scale, silence, and resistance to containment allow meaning to loosen from certainty, leaving the landscape emotionally accessible without ever fully resolving into explanation.

AUTHOR: chad coombs (Canada)

Chad Coombs is a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, collage, and painting. His practice examines identity, perception, and the systems that shape human behaviour, often focusing on the tension between internal experience and external influence.

His work is rooted in process and material. Using analog photography, hand-constructed imagery, and direct mark-making, Coombs treats each medium as an active participant in the work rather than a neutral tool. Distortion, fragmentation, and recontextualization are recurring strategies, used to disrupt familiar ways of seeing and challenge how individuals are defined and understood.

Much of his work centers on portraiture, not as representation, but as a site of construction. Figures are often altered, layered, or destabilized, reflecting the competing forces that shape identity, including social systems, cultural expectations, and collective perception. Through this approach, his images resist fixed interpretation, instead holding tension between recognition and ambiguity.

His perspective is informed by lived experience, including autism, which functions within his practice as a method of observation and inquiry. This lens allows him to bypass conventional social framing and engage more directly with structure, behaviour, and contradiction.

Coombs’ work often rejects polished resolution in favour of immediacy and presence. Imperfections, material inconsistencies, and visible process are not corrected but integrated, reinforcing the idea that meaning is embedded within the act of making itself.

Through his work, Coombs constructs images that are both confrontational and reflective, inviting viewers to question not only what they are seeing, but how and why they see it that way.