Chris Kilmer recognizes the element of theater inherent in all photography.

“As the dark cloth drapes over my camera, the house lights dim and my eyes begin to savor the cast of characters glowing on the 80-square-inch proscenium,” he once wrote in a description of his work. “Form and light take their cues. Space, motion and time make an entrance. A concept seeks applause.”

For many photographers, the star of this drama is often America’s natural landscape – the sharp, jagged tops of mountains pressed against a cloud-filled sky, windswept plains, valleys cast in shadow. As a native Californian who grew up exploring the beauty of redwood forests and West Coast beaches, and who later fine-tuned his appreciation for the landscape in workshops with noted artists such as Ansel Adams and Morley Baer, Kilmer also celebrates the visual seduction of nature, teasing out its most lonely and desolate moments, surrendering artistic control to its perfection. But rather than always presenting wilderness as an untouched, pristine world that exists only as an existential haven, Kilmer often infuses it with stories and questions about the role and presence of humans. In one image, simple grassy plain complemented by an overwhelming expanse of sky is framed against a row of upright, abandoned old cars, giant pieces of unusable trash set up as someone’s idea of decorative fixtures. Rather than taking pictures of deer darting shyly behind tree trunks, Kilmer instead shows them gutted and slaughtered, hanging in a meat packer’s barn. His photograph of a house in a beautiful vista surrounded by mountains reveals the owner’s wonderfully absurd collection of fake, plastic animals, studded all over a tree in the front yard – consumer culture rivaling the real thing living and breathing nearby.

This quirky sense of irony that surfaces occasionally in Kilmer’s work reflects his other passions: street photography and urban culture. His love for capturing people during offbeat moments took root while he was an undergraduate at Sacramento State University, when he received a grant to document everyday culture and community in Sacramento with his camera. Later, he found himself drawn to getting all sorts of interesting characters on film – teenagers cruising busy streets downtown drunk on their own freedom as much as the booze, roughneck men who are heart-attack serious about designing the perfect ride for a tractor race in a small town, a grimacing businessman leering out the window during a power lunch. Kilmer also reveals how everyday human spaces can become societal indicators. His award-winning photograph of a sterile law office towering over a city, punctuated by a tiny Styrofoam cup set carefully on a desk, evokes pressing questions about America’s relentless work ethic, a drive that sometimes imprisons people in an endless march toward success away from their families, in lifeless environments.

Kilmer’s eye for human nature and his awe of the natural world come together in playful, provocative ways in his latest series, “Voyage of Discovery,” a group of images he describes as the result of being a native Californian now living in the Midwest. Each fanciful image presents a vignette of a mythical journey at sea, complete with a daily excerpt from the captain’s log, and encounters with strange sea creatures.

“It’s a little dash of Darwin, it’s a little taste of National Geographic. It’s bit of Jacques Cousteau and ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ all at once. So it’s an exploration,” Kilmer says.

Many of the images use tongue-in-cheek humor to explore Kilmer’s nostalgia for his sea experiences growing up in California. Each work includes carefully recorded geographic coordinates – coordinates which happen to designate the location of Kilmer’s own home in Westwood, Kansas. To add another twist of silliness, many photographs are copyrighted as property of the “Kansas Maritime Archives.”

The fabricated images are as much a reflection of Kilmer’s Photoshop skills as they are of his attempts to honor his past. For example, in “Bay of Pigs,” Kilmer shows a giant boar with its tongue lolling out, peering over the side of a ship at sea. “A large river Boar, Sus scrofa aesturium, paid a social call just after we let go the fore and aft lines,” the captain’s log states. “Evidently, the aroma from the cook’s galley was too much of a temptation for the sea swine to resist an impromptu visit to the starboard rail.” While silly on the surface, “Voyage of Discovery” in many ways demonstrates Kilmer’s creative answer to finding an inner beauty and sense of imagination while living in the very different landscape of Kansas, a place far removed from the West Coast.

“This work started in part because I’m homesick for the motherland,” Kilmer says. “I grew up 30 years in this landscape that spoke to you every time you went outside – you heard the ocean, the mountains, the desert. When you work in a redwood grove for the summer you kind of get spoiled.. I loved looking at the bones of the earth. There’s not that many bones out here in the Midwest, so I’ve got to create my own bones.”

Whether he’s capturing humans’ connection to nature, probing the culture and meaning of different American enclaves, or creating a nautical journey with the help of staged objects and computer design software, Kilmer is forever presenting the little stories, the tiny moments of thought that exist somewhere between aesthetic beauty and gritty, funny-bone reality.