Inside the House of Montague
I came into the world in 1981, in a small eastern Idaho town called Ammon. The childhood that followed was unsupervised in the best sense — long days with my grandparents in Blackfoot and Idaho Falls, summers and winters in Island Park, McCall, Redfish Lake and West Yellowstone. I was raised between two worlds: the analog freedom of the Idaho landscape, and the home computer revolution rising just over the horizon, already preparing to claim me.
The IBM 286 arrived at the turn of the 1990s, taupe and unlovely and entirely magnificent. DOS became my second language. My attention turned from the outdoors to a frontier with no edges. I mowed lawns and taught the older generation to use software — every dollar of it raised to fund a machine of my own, built piece by piece from the pages of Computer Shopper. Once it ran, I gave it over to the early internet and hosted a BBS from my bedroom. The eye that had once pulled me into the mountains now pulled me into the screen — from MS Paint to PaintShop Pro, and into the genesis of my digital art.
A move from Ammon to Nampa brought me to Bishop Kelly, and to the most formative influence of my life. The school demanded a discipline, a structure, and a standard of excellence I had never been asked to meet. I did not understand the gift of it then. I understand it now: that excellence is built through chosen hardship, and that suffering, met with discipline, is the instrument by which a person becomes more than they were.
At Boise State, the mathematics of a Computer Science degree became a wall I could not climb. I turned to Marketing instead, hoping to learn how art might live in the world of business. That plan held until I encountered my first immersive VR scenes — built with Pano2QTVR, Flash, and Krpano — and understood its potential at once. I began capturing and building virtual experiences, and founded my first company around them: REGAL360. There I pioneered HDR panoramic photography and virtual tours, refining the work until it became an obsession with one thing above all others — the experience of the viewer.
That obsession took me traveling — to the world's great museums, its landmarks, its wild places — capturing them so that others might stand where I had stood. I returned each time with more than an image. I returned with an obligation: that what I had witnessed be carried at nothing less than the standard the work itself demanded.
What Devotion Taught
Pepper arrived while I was still living in the aftershock of losing Kevin. My wife understood my state better than I did, and had begun looking toward the local shelter — certain, as she often is, of something I could not yet see. I resisted. I told myself my heart had no love left to give.
On November 24th, 2024, we drove to the shelter as a family in the early autumn dawn. I attended but only so I could talk everyone out of it.
They brought her out from isolation — a kennel cough had kept her hidden from adoption, unseen behind the other dogs. None of that reached her. She came into the kennel already certain of us, indifferent to every other animal in the area, and gave her affection immediately without condition or hesitation. It took less than five minutes. I looked up at my wife, and the decision was already made on every face in the kennel. I understood, in that moment, exactly how much grief I had been carrying — because I felt the precise instant some of it lifted.
She has not left my side since. My wife calls her my soul dog, and the name is accurate. What Pepper taught was not a lesson so much as a way of attending to the world — a steady, patient, unhurried devotion, given freely and asked for in return only as presence.
That devotion changed the work. I came to recognize the lived warmth an animal brings into a space, and I began to deviate from the cold precision of pure architectural photography — incorporating the connection and quiet companionship that animals like Pepper carry into a scene. The presence of animals throughout the House of Montague, in the artwork and in the presentation alike, begins here. It begins with her.
