“The new body of work, “Metrosphere”, is really my reaction to living in a major metropolitan city combined with my conflicted feelings about industry’s place in our landscape. The tiny bits of the sky I see in my daily life in Chicago normally get filtered through great networks of power lines and cables. There is more often than not an airliner somewhere up in the air at any given time. It’s hard to tell where the contrails and industrial steam clouds end and the real clouds begin. I present the urban sky as an extension of the industrial landscape.

For me “PROOF” was a chance to simply reveal how I process my raw images to become an exaggeration of reality. The images on the contact sheet are pastel and innocuous clouds; I process them to become richer, darker and imposing. Despite the possibilities of digital manipulation, my images are very “straight up” and not altered much more than they could be in a traditional dark room.” — Michelle Keim, 2010