“Gabe Hollis taught me the word “pareidolia”—our ability to see faces in just about anything. Since 2016, when I began to capture artistic abstractions with my iPhone, I have taken literally dozens, maybe hundreds, of photos in which some kinds of faces appear. It was hard to choose just two. One is the distressed surface of a fallen log, stripped of its bark, that I stepped over on a hike through the Ellwood Preserve in Goleta. The other is a shot of mannequins looking weirdly both alive and dead. I bring as much joy to the image as the image brings to me. Certainly, in the case of the log, the impression of life is in the eye of the beholder. Maybe that’s how it always is. Christian faith leads me to live with charged imagination of the actual world, a world that began and continues to exist through God’s creative power.”

–Randy VanderMey