via Iowa

After four years living in various rural towns and mid-sized cities across the Midwest I have come to realize how places act like filters for daily experiences--subtly shapping and forming my thoughts, identity (the midwest may be deemed to be a homogenous blob in the center of the country, but I have found each of these places remarkably different). Do all Americans experience "place" this way? Who even has the time to reflect on their experience of a "place"? This image is taken half-way between two cities--one that I lived in for four years in Iowa and one where I live currently in Wisoncsin.

Artists and "Place"

As I begin the research portion of this project, I am curious about the many types of relationships that have been formed between contemporary artists and places. Here are a few selected models:
1) Artists that convey a "sense of place" through their work combining a description of the physical landscape with the artists memories/experience of that place.
2) Artists whose work is to rebuild or reclaim a place. Their art work is also an act of conservation.
3) Artists who connect a place to a certain historical event or moment, that may reiterate or challenge pre-existing "grand narratives."
4) Artists who reveal how a "sense of place" can become commodified.
5) Artists who find or create borderline places. Places not easily recognized, mapped or preserved.
6) Artists whose works is informed by the place in which they live, but more specifically how this shapes their identity.
7)Artists who explore place as a psychoanalytic construct, fixating on the separation from the maternal body.
With many of the artists whose work comes to mind within the realm of these loosely defined categories what is shared is a sense that the function of the resulting artwork is to enable the artist to establish a connection to a place, while also leaving space for the viewer to enter into their own relationship with the work of art(possibly as a site in itself) and a place. This relationship may be affable, alienating, or abject.

Project Proposal

After many thoughtful requests--here is the project that I have proposed to work on during the coming year:
With the Joan Mitchell Grant I will create a series of works based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter.” Since my work is a critique of the dualities inherent in Western thought and language, I am fascinated by Hawthorne’s ability to muddy the definitions of “good” and “evil” in this early American novel. The recent series of works, What Is Yours Is Mine Is Yours, examines the exchange of words, emotions, guilt and pleasure between mothers and daughters in a puritanical society as represented by Hester and Pearl. While Hester’s richly embroidered “A” is a decoration that accentuates and disguises her identity, her daughter Pearl is an “indistinguishable color” as she defies the parameters of shame placed on her by society. Due to the impact of this text on my work, I would like to take my research a step further. I would like to work in the landscape in which the novel is set--a New England woods. My project would involve using drawing materials and digital imaging to document the woods behind my grandmother’s home in Western Massachusetts, while weaving in Hawthorne’s lucid descriptions. This process would result in a series of painted, drawn and cut works on and with paper that would be installed in a local space with a history that could further expand the work. This project would extend and build upon my current artistic practice, as well as my connectivity to New England as a place of origin both for my family, for Hawthorne, and for an American consciousness. What I imagine I will find there is a barrage of fixed, linear narratives that after further exmination reveal the transitory and liminal space of the forest described by Hawthorne in “The Scarlet Letter.”

Part D. Protection of Natural Features

Doing some research online today of the town planning board that regulates the development of subdivisions in the areas surrounding and inluding my grandmother's land in Massachusetts, I found this detailed advisory for developers on the subject of "protecting natural features" under the heading of "Section III: Subdivision Design Standards," which sounds good in theory:

D. PROTECTION OF NATURAL FEATURES
All natural features, such as large trees (greater than 8 inches in diameter DBH), water courses, wetlands, scenic points, historic locations, stone walls, and similar community assets which will contribute to the attractiveness and value of the property shall be shown on the plan and preserved. Appropriate reseeding and replanting of the non-paved areas of the public way is a component part of the construction of the subdivision, and is to be completed by the developer prior to acceptance. Existing vegetation shall be disturbed at a minimum. Except where necessary to conform to road design, driveways, safety, and drainage, major earth grading shall be avoided. The Board, at its discretion, shall require portions of the public way to be planted with groups of shrubs or trees for aesthetic value and effect as to enhance the property. At least two trees per lot shall be preserved or planted within the right-of-way or within 10 feet of the right-of-way.

Art(s) Project DAY Zero

This purpose of this blog is to document my first year post-MFA. During this year I will be working on a project about my grandmother's land in western Mass. which will be sold to developers in the fall, but the idea for this project came two years ago from Nathaniel Hawthorne's description of the New England woods in his novel "The Scarlet Letter." This landscape has absolutely confounded me since I up and moved to western Mass. for one summer when I was fifteen after reading Hawthorne's book. The first issue to confront in this project is the question of "place"? Can a site exist in reality in an American culture in which site-specificity is readily fabricated? (Example: I went to a restaurant last night in suburban Chicago that was like a theme park--complete with faux tarnished mirrors and "worn" tables). So I started this project by rereading Miwon Kwon's "One Place After Another" (published in October Magazine in 1997). One of the main questions to face in this project is outlined by Kwon in the last paragraph of her essay, "What would it mean now to sustain the cultural and historical specificity of a place (and self) that is neither a simulacral pacifier nor a willful invention?"