Images with stone

More images, etc

Here's a mock-up of what I hope my spread in the MFA Graduate Catalog will look like (lookit me, I can use Microsoft Publisher! Woo!)

And then here are some more pictures of the latest Gettysburg images on glass. Now it's only a matter of choosing the best three or four for the exhibition, preparing the appropriate stone bases, and materializing some pedestals (and transporting them to Boston in January, the worst part). I've decided to name them the Cenotaph series, and thanks to Jesseca Ferguson for the word. It literally means "empty tomb," which fits in very nicely with my absence/presence theme:

Gettysburg on Glass

...for my new mentor to view. New images to come in the next few weeks, after I make another trip down there to photograph.

The other half of the project?

Many thanks to my mentor Liz for yet another great meeting. I'm glad that I decided to bring these tintypes along, as they may just be the missing link that holds together the Gettysburg project! Devils Den, to me, has always been the true "monument" at Gettysburg. While the other statues and memorials around the battlefields try their best to inspire awe and strength within the visitors (I would argue that they usually don't), Devils Den does it naturally. This huge pile of boulders, some about fifty feet high, are thrust up violently from the rolling hills and pastures surrounding it. During the war snipers used Devils Den as a place to hide, and control of the rock formation changed sides many times during the three days of battle. I like the one panorama I've done of this place in tin so far. I'm sure I'll do more now.

New Paper

After six months, I finally have internet at home again. Granted, it's satellite internet (no cable out here, and I'll be damned if I ever get stuck with dial-up again), but I can finally post blog entries and do MFA work (and shop and all of the other e-wonders) without possibly getting in trouble at work for doing so. It's a brave new world, folks.

Attached is the paper for May, as well as mock-ups - just mock-ups made in photoshop, for the future images on glass that I discuss in the paper. The Gettysburg trip was great...we're already planning for a third in the Fall. Just in time for thesis, which is getting closer every day. Ugh.

MFA Paper
April/May 2008

“…How we understand space is affected by how we understand time. What was here is inseparable from what is here: it must all be considered together, without recourse to nostalgia or amnesia.”[1]

Perhaps living in a place like Gettysburg naturally causes one to become more responsive to landscape. As a child I would go to the Civil War battlefields here and see thousands upon thousands of people stare across a field, studying every rise and dip in the landscape, every tree and rock, as if these things themselves contained the essence of the horrific events of 1863. In very few other places would one see a phenomenon such as this. Since childhood I seem to have been drawn to other areas prized for their landscapes for one reason or another. I have lived in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, known for inspiring artists from the Hudson River School, and now I work in and reside near Cooperstown, NY, best known for baseball (“invented” by, ironically, Abner Doubleday, who fought for the Union at Gettysburg and has a monument there) but also for the beautiful Otsego Lake, headwaters of the Susquehanna River.

Each of these places is visited by tourists for different reasons, and an interesting future project for me would be to investigate and record how areas become and are maintained as grand tourism centers. At the moment, though, I am focusing my energies on understanding Gettysburg specifically, as a center for history and memory. Jim Weeks, an American history professor at Penn State University, has written a crucial book on the subject of Gettysburg as a marketer of memory. In Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and An American Shrine, Weeks outlines what few have taken the time to study: the history of Gettysburg after the battle. He explores how those in charge of maintaining the battlefields and town over the years have created a unique blend of the sacred and secular. Nearly 150 years after the battle, however, the marriage is not complete. States Weeks, “In his most famous speech, [President] Lincoln said the living could not hallow the Gettysburg battlefield any more than the dead who fell already had. Successive generations ignoring those words have met with frustration over a work that defies completion.”[2]

The current method for achieving this unattainable completion is the idea of restoration. Media projects over the past few years, including Ken Burns’ documentary on the Civil War, Michael Shaara’s blend of historical fact and fiction in the book The Killer Angels, and the Ted Turner-produced film Gettysburg have invigorated a new population of battlefield-seekers (and Civil War reenactors) who wished to see the landscape in its historical setting. What did the soldiers who fought on Little Round Top or at Pickett’s Charge see in 1863? In an effort to reflect the current theme of what Jim Weeks calls “heritage,” the Gettysburg National Military Park Commission (GNMP) has begun an effort to restore the landscape as much as possible to how it appeared in July of 1863. This plan will, for example, “remove 576 acres of ‘non-historic trees’ but restore 115 ‘historic’ acres of trees and 160 acres of orchards (using ornamental rather than fruit-bearing trees).”[3] These actions inspire Jim Weeks to ask, “If all agree that certain ground is hallowed, does it need to have its historical integrity restored? Moreover, is there not a difference between preserving land to remember an event and transforming the land to look like it did when the event occurred?”[4] The question becomes all the more pertinent, and complex, when one realizes that this restoration process does not include the removal of the nearly 1,400 monuments scattered across the battlefields, making Gettysburg the most monument-filled battlefield on the planet.

“Monumental architecture and sculpture rarely hold their own against space or time. The feeling of reverence sought by monument makers is not easy to come by in our irreverent society.”[5] Lucy Lippard’s words ring very true – Maya Lin is the only artist working today that immediately comes to mind who has produced effective contemporary memorials – in regards to the plethora of marble and bronze sculptures at Gettysburg. The heyday of monument-building on the battlefields was between 1885 and 1910 (although the construction of them continued throughout the 20th century), building to a point where certain areas of the landscape truly look like oversize versions of the rural cemeteries the post-war battlefield plans were modeled after. Politics played a major part in the size and placement of monuments, as each regiment and family members of important generals fought to ensure that their respective sculptures were as imposing and impressive as possible. However, as a child in Gettysburg I spent very little time studying the monuments; I was far more interested in the landscape, especially the grand boulders of Devils Den, and the striking expanse of fields that became the setting for Pickett’s Charge. Monuments only interested me if they permitted me to achieve an overhead view of the landscape surrounding it, such as the tower on Little Round Top or the massive, two-story Pennsylvania Monument on statue-laden Cemetery Ridge. Returning to the battlefield this year as a 29 year-old, I noticed that other visitors had a similar relationship to the monuments. Rarely do they now inspire the kind of reverence which was intended when they were created; they simply become oversized, expensive information tablets – they fought here, he died there – or convenient backdrops for group photographs. They are an archaic method of remembrance, overly laden with nostalgia and taken seriously by practically no one in either the art world or society in general.

So now, perhaps absurdly, I am using a photographic process that many would agree to be archaic in order to create images in which I can erase the equally antiquated Gettysburg monuments from the landscape. I am utilizing liquid emulsion to create black and white photographs of the Gettysburg battlefields and monuments on thick sheets of glass. Then, I scratch the monuments off of the glass using an X-acto knife, leaving a transparent silhouette of the statue. What remains is the landscape surrounding the statue. When I first started performing this act, I asked myself the question, how would if affect the Gettysburg landscape and its interpretation by the public if the monuments were no longer on the battlefields? The intention was partly to complete the job of the restorers, taking their restorations to limits that they may sometimes consider but would never act on, for fear of repercussion. However, I soon realized that the erasure of the monument from the image actually returns the viewer’s gaze to the space the monument once occupied. The figures become ghosts (fitting, since Gettysburg has a lucrative market involving ghosts and ghost tours these days), permeating the landscape and invoking loss, time, and memory. The images also invoke photographs taken at the battlefields, using glass plate negatives, directly after the battle by photographers such as Matthew Brady.

It must be remembered that the monuments I am scratching out of my photographs were made by artists. Local, little-known sculptors as well as famous artists are both represented by memorials at Gettysburg. The North Carolina monument, completed in 1929, was sculpted by Gutzon Borglum, who is best known (for better or worse) for sculpting the giant portraits at Mount Rushmore. The sculptures, especially the portrait statues and equestrian monuments, are direct throwbacks to ancient Roman art and architecture, and while this may have been significant imagery to American culture during the 19th century, it has since lost much of its import. When it comes to monuments in contemporary culture, it seems that less is more. States Lucy Lippard, “some of the most impressive ideas for monuments have dealt directly with the fact that absence can be more powerfully evoked than presence.”[6] She cites examples such as the large hole that Claes Oldenberg had dug behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1967, creating a negative space to offset the monumental, mausoleum effect of the museum itself. In scratching out the monuments from my photographs, I wonder what the general public’s response will be. Offended? Amused? Indifferent? Will the erasure affect how the viewer interprets memory, history, and the landscape? I am hopeful that my works will add to a crucial, post-modern conversation about these issues.


[1] Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local (New York: The New Press, 1997), 116.
[2] Jim Weeks, Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and An American Shrine (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003), 225.
[3] Ibid, 191-192.
[4] Ibid, 194.
[5] Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local (New York: The New Press, 1997), 107.
[6] Ibid, 110.

Relay for Life

Just before Christmas last year, a very good friend of mine, Ron Wilcox, was lost to cancer after a long struggle. He was my photo professor during my undergrad and helped me to appreciate not only the art of photography, but also the importance of going the extra mile to make something as good and high quality as it could possibly be. We became good friends and stayed in constant contact after I graduated. We also became Netflix buddies: we would often go to each other's houses to watch obscure movies or old classics. His sense of humor was what I'll remember him for most, though. There wasn't a pun he didn't know, and he was lightning-quick with them.

After a long spring and summer in chemo treatments, and finally surgery, everything seemed to have gone perfectly. Ron was gaining his strength, in great spirits, and looking forward to all the activities that he was hoping to be doing before the cancer hit, including making a grand trip of Asia, where he had made many friends in the Peace Corps years ago. Then a few weeks before Christmas his cancer returned and it spread more quickly than anyone could anticipate. When he called me a week before he died I didn't realize how bad it was, that he was actually going through his entire list of friends, spending hours upon hours on the phone because he knew the end was coming. The next thing I knew he was gone.

I say all this to finally say something not very eloquent but damned true: cancer sucks. I hate it. I want to destroy it before it gets to anyone else I hold dear (I just learned that one of my aunts has cancer now too). I've done Relay for Life for the past few years, but now it holds extra meaning. If you wish to donate to the cause, please go to the following link. Thanks.

http://main.acsevents.org/goto/kevingray

And, here's a link to some of Ron's work. "Me and my RC" will always be a classic to me. :)

Ron Wilcox

Thought Paper for March: Maps

Kevin Gray
MFA Thought Paper
April 2008

“The map, and map-derived art, is in itself fundamentally an overlay – simultaneously a place, a journey, and a mental concept; abstract and figurative; remote and intimate. Maps are like ‘stills’ of voyages, stasis laid on motion. Our current fascination with them may have something to do with our need for a meaningful overview, for a way to oversee and understand our location.”1

My interest in maps reaches far back to my childhood. As an adolescent I would spend hours poring over road and trail maps, creating detailed plans for trips that would more often than not never become realities. I can remember planning elaborate daily schedules for vacations to places like Glacier National Park in Montana and Baxter State Park in Maine, studying the maps and guidebooks closely and writing out timetables so that we could squeeze as much exploration as possible out of every day. I would use the contour lines of a map to attempt to determine the steepness and overall difficulty of a trail and would adapt the timetables accordingly. The destination for most of these hikes and trips was a prominent view or scenic overlook; these, to me, would make the trip worthwhile. These “trips on paper” were idealized vacations, plans not affected by forces such as weather, delays, or fatigue. The only factors that mattered were distance, time, and destination.

I still use maps to plan hikes and trips today, but hopefully I am now a bit more realistic about the expectations. However I often continue to want to idealize the landscape, which has led to years of emulating photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Not only did they photograph in the beautiful, exotic locales I had always hoped (and in some cases, planned) to visit, but their images of Yosemite and the Western U.S. amplified the romantic qualities of these landscapes and turned them into the sublime. I have never been to the West, but I have spent a great deal of time in places where the spiritual precursors to these photographers, the Hudson River School of artists, painted their sublime landscapes. I photograph in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Catskill Mountains of New York, and I often find myself drawn to vistas that share this romantic quality.

If contemporary art has taught us anything, however, it is that this style of landscape photography, or any photography for that matter, is inherently a lie. Even when a landscape photographer intentionally strays from the conventions of composition and form, as in the case of someone like Lee Friedlander, the rectangular frame of the photographic format automatically forces the artist to make choices about what is to be included in the image. What is behind the photographer? What is directly above and below? What time, and on what date, was the photograph taken? All of these potential unknowns add a crucial layer of uncertainty that makes the photograph a compelling image to look at.

Similarly, a map attempts to show the absolute truth but falls short no matter how hard it may try. Denis Wood states, “No map can show everything. Could it, it would no more than reproduce the world, which, without the map, we already have. It is only its selection from the world’s overwhelming richness that justifies the map.”2 However, Wood’s statement is only a part of the paradox. While a map shows less than what actually exists for practical reasons – the absence of trees, stoplights, and telephone poles on a road map, for example – it also shows more than a person living on earth can see at any one time. The overhead, birds-eye view of a typical map is not affected by walls, trees, hills, or the myriad of other obstacles that block our standard, gravity-enforced view of the world. One can see the topography of an area as a whole, which creates a new relationship to that area. This information helps us to imagine what exists around that hillside, behind that tree, or even underneath our feet.

I am exploring the issue of truth in the representation, and knowledge, of the landscape as it is recorded in photography and maps, through a series of artwork. Poring through my negatives of photographs taken in the White Mountains, I have begun to search for images where 1) I can locate on a map with near exactitude where I was standing when the photograph was taken, and 2) a great expanse of the landscape is visible. I am studying these photographs closely to determine with as much accuracy as possible what sections of the appropriate US Geological Survey topographical map can be seen in the image. Using this information, I then block out all areas on the map in black paint that are not visible in the photograph. When the photograph and the altered map are juxtaposed, the respective difficulties that each medium has with the notion of truth are revealed.












“To ask for a map is to say, ‘Tell me a story.’”3

Not all mapmakers create what they may consider art, but many artists make maps. Peter Turchi, an author and teacher, argues in his book, Maps of the Imagination, that writing is a form of mapmaking because writers need to know how to lead a reader from Point A to Point B. There are many visual artists who have used maps directly in their work, or have taken scientific elements from them. Jasper Johns incorporated maps of the United States in some of his paintings. Architect and artist Maya Lin explored maps and topography in great detail for her recent Systematic Landscapes exhibition. Lin utilized computer mapmaking technology to create sculptures in a gallery setting that spoke both to the landscape and the systems humans use to understand it. Other artists use maps to understand the story of their own lives or to create new realities. Katherine Harmon compiled many examples of these kinds of maps made by artists such as William Wegman and Claes Oldenberg in her book, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination. By appropriating the symbols and techniques of mapmakers, all of the artists listed here create new meanings and stories that relate to traditional maps but add a conceptual layer to them.

The recent event that sparked my new interest in maps and mapping was my October trip to Gettysburg, where I lived as a child. There I was reintroduced to a style of map that is familiar to any school student in a social studies class: the battlefield map. One of the key methods used by people to understand the movements of troops and the strategies used during battle are maps that reduce the soldiers, sometimes hundreds or thousands of troops, to simple colored rectangles and/or arrows. These abstract symbols quickly come to be understood by the viewer, or reader, as people and events within the story of the map. The rectangles (often colored red and blue, especially in Civil War maps), become the people participating in the battle, and the arrows not only depict the direction traveled by the troops but are also understood as representing a particular span of time. Once the symbols are deciphered, a viewer can quickly begin to see which group is attacking, which group is defending, and perhaps most importantly, who is winning. Therefore, these battlefield maps are quite effective in telling stories, as they give us setting, important characters, conflict, and a sense of the passing of time.






The conquering and defense of territory has a long history in the Western world that I need not detail here. It is sufficed to say that this conflict comes in both grand and small scales, from the invasion of entire countries to a homeowner’s battle with a neighbor’s curious dog. During my lifetime I have lived in many different places, rarely attaining a true sense of home in any of them. Some of these places I lived in for ten years or more; others, only a few months. Regardless of the length of time, there was a lingering sense in all of these places that my existence there would be temporary, that I would be moving on at a moment’s notice. Part of this feeling was due to a natural bit of wanderlust on my part, but I also felt a sense of various outside forces threatening to push me away from my recent “claim.” I have begun to play with this phenomenon in a series of artwork called Personal Conquests. “Play” is a carefully chosen word here, because children play War from an early age. Forts are constructed from snow or wooden boards and are fiercely defended by the kids who claim them. What begins as a game can sometimes turn ugly and bring out as much raw anger and emotion that a real war, waged by adults, can generate. The artworks I am creating, from a conceptual standpoint, are barely more sophisticated than one of these childhood battles. I am making a series of maps in which I “attack” and “defend” the places I have lived during my lifetime. I first traced on mulberry paper the contour lines from USGS topographical maps that correspond to the regions where my homes were, including Littlestown, PA, Augusta, ME, and Crawford Notch, NH. Then, using the lay of the land as a guide, I laid out battle strategies for my imaginary troops on a separate sheet of paper. Troops in red attack and attempt to conquer; troops in blue defend their home. I plan to attach these two sheets together using a thin layer of encaustic wax, creating a translucent effect. Because these fictional stories of battles are depicted through maps (and because they will be sealed in wax), they will have an air of authenticity to them despite their complete absurdity.

The two projects of mine that I have discussed in this paper have something in common other than the use of maps. They are both grounded in, and taken from, the places that have been important to me over the years. Places that I have called home, and the places where I actually feel at home (there is a difference) are the subjects of these artworks. I am combining the nostalgic and the scientific, the fictional and the real, in my work. Both are valid ways of perceiving and by combining them a rich – if complicated – method of understanding place can be achieved.

1. Lucy Lippard, Overlay (New York: The New Press, 1983), 122.
2. Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York: Guildord 1992), quoted in Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (Texas: Trinity University Press, 2004), 40.
3.Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (Texas: Trinity University Press 2004), 11.

Maya Lin rocks the hiz-ouse (yes, I deserve to be hit for that)

Until recently I only knew Maya Lin for her Vietnam Veterans' Memorial in Washington, D.C. (which she designed in GRAD SCHOOL...ugh, it makes me sick). It turns out that her more recent work is some of the coolest, most elegant I've ever seen, and it's becoming a real influence on me.

You all owe it to yourselves to watch this documentary, and then pick up her book, "Boundaries," in which she writes about her work. Awesome stuff.

Maya Lin, Systematic Landscapes

DON'T PANIC!...or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my Artwork

Good gravy. The past week to week and a half or so I've been steadily throwing myself into more of a panic about what I've been doing for grad school. I'm a second-guesser by nature, but lately it's become third and fourth-guessing as I can feel that dreaded six-letter word - THESIS - peeking at me from around the corner. My typical manner of working on art is to fiddle around with three or four projects at once, while trying to push away the new ideas that pop into my head so that I don't find myself working on 27 projects at the same time. I know that I need to focus now so that I have a really good, solid body of work come January when I graduate...but what to work on? It's gotten to the point a couple of times where I go into my studio and just freeze up, not working on anything because I'm not sure what project I should be devoting my time to, or if any of them at all are worth it.

On Sunday I went to visit Liz, my mentor, with these problems in mind (Liz, if you're reading this, I think I left some USGS maps at your house in a cardboard tube! Hold onto them for me until our next meeting, would you?). I really knew I was in trouble when she would ask me important questions about the work and I responded with a mixture of broken sentences, primitive grunts, and silent pauses long enough to drive a Mac truck through. Part of the problem is that I've tossed aside so many of the projects I've done since I started the program. I let go of Polaroid emulsion lifts (which in hindsight is a good thing, since they've now discontinued ALL of their instant film. Bastards...), the mannequin tintype series I think is still interesting but not what I want to pursue right now, and the old Woodstock hotel series and anything that seemed purely "nostalgic" has taken a back seat as well. To top it off I'm rethinking the Gettysburg work and really can't make much more progress on it until I go back in April (having a full-time job and being on a tight budget can be a drag). Now I've thrown maps and mapmaking into the mix and...yeah, I really felt like I was spread too thin.

Two things have helped since the panicking began. The first was a suggestion that Liz made to me during our meeting. She wants me to write an artist's statement NOW, which concisely encompasses the works that I want to pursue at this moment. The results of this are below. The second bit of help was something that was right under my nose and yet I so rarely take advantage of: the advice of Sarah, my fiancee. Maybe it's because she doesn't have a great knowledge of contemporary art, or maybe it's because she tells it EXACTLY how she sees it and never ever holds back (what a strain to my precious little ego!), but I tend not to ask her too often for her critique of my work. What a mistake. Yesterday I brought her up to the studio and explained to her what I was trying to do and just told her, "let me have it." Her knowledge of history and her very honest perceptions actually helped me a great deal, and now I feel a lot better about the work.

So here's the Artist's Statement of the moment. Hopefully it won't change too much by the time THESIS rolls around:

Every landscape has its own histories, both natural and human. A landscape, or a space, becomes a place to us when we begin to feel that we know it on a personal level, and we create our own history with it. However, this knowledge comes in many forms, and is also very subjective. The artwork I create deals with my knowledge of the places I have become familiar with, and how it compares and contrasts with the knowledge of others.

As I stated, knowledge of place comes in many forms. Memory, nostalgia, recorded history, and science all shape the way we see the landscape. History is a story that changes in meaning as it is told in new iterations through generations. We try to solidify human events through words, maps, memorials, etc...but these are mere abstract symbols that are constantly jostled and warped by the passage of time. It can become easy to misunderstand a place and its history, to become so wrapped up in a particular moment that one cannot see anything beyond it, or to feel that a place is so familiar that one overstates their knowledge of it. This can happen on both personal and cultural levels, for a multitude of reasons.

I am using a mixture of mediums and imagery - photographs on glass, maps, encausitcs, etc. - to explore my own connection to the landscape as well as cultural connections. I combine the scientific with the personal to come to new understandings of place, as well as to discover the limitations of such knowledge.

Hmm...still a little too broad. What do all y'all think?

The answer to last week's puzzler

So, just how much of that map is seen in the picture I posted last week? Approximately, this much. I used the contour lines on the topo map, as well as my knowledge of the area, to figure out to the best of my ability how much of the land is actually seen. I sacrificed a $6 USGS map of that particular "quadrangle" and blacked out everything else. On a poster-sized map, it's pretty dramatic. Standing on top of that mountain, or lots of mountains in the Whites, you almost feel like you can see forever. Turns out that you're not seeing nearly as much of the earth as you think you are (and when you photograph it, you see even less).

So what does this have to do with Gettysburg, tintypes, or anything else I've been doing? Um, nothing. But I'm in a minor limbo with some of those projects. I just picked up the large, thick sheets of glass I'll be re-doing some of the Gettysburg panoramas on, but they need to be prepped and coated before I can print. I also need more pictures of Gettysburg, and I won't be going back until April. There's an encaustic project I'm going to do, but I need to take a workshop in encaustics that won't happen till mid-March. These blacked-out maps can be done anytime, whenever I find a photo I want to use and order the appropriate map. I need to get some matte black paint, though. This glossy stuff is awful.

Can you see it?

I can. Here's a topographic map of Crawford Notch in NH, where I used to live. Pretend you're standing on the spot marked "Elephant Head" and looking south.


Now look at this picture I took years ago from Elephant Head, looking south. What parts of the map can you see in the photograph?


As an extention of the map project I've been working on, I'd love to go back to all the places I've lived (or loved) and play this "mapping" game.

Looking for the "index"

For all of the photographers out there, I highly recommend the book, Photography Theory, in which James Elkins leads a group of art historians in a panel discussion on what photography is, how it's related to the art world, and how it should be considered and handled in 21st century art criticism. The actual transcript of the panel discussion is kind of strange: it definitely creates more questions than answers (something you'll be used to if you're as big a fan of LOST on tv as I am!), and many of the historians and theorists get stuck on the issue of the "index." That is, can a photograph really be considered a reasonable referent to the real world? A photograph isn't the real thing, but it's meant to stand in for the real thing. The panel went round and round on this issue without really getting anywhere, but what is great about the book is that James Elkins asked a whole bunch of OTHER historians and critics to look at the panel transcript and write their own response to it. The result is that you get lots of very well-informed opinions on the matter, and, for me, I began to understand why particular photographers working today - Gursky, Ruff, Burtynzky, the Bechers, are so HUGE in the art world right now. All of them are ground in "index": making unemotional records of the world (people, buildings, landscape) that, even if digital manipulation is done in some instances, look real. Seems to be the big thing currently.

Anyway, great book.

Some fun facts about Gettysburg

Sometimes it pays to work at a museum/historical association. Our library holds a wonderful book I just discovered, titled Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and an American Shrine by Jim Weeks. This book records not the history of Gettysburg during the battle like pretty much every other book I've seen, instead it records how the town became tourist destination #1 for so many Americans directly after the battle and up to today. The battlefield was first marketed to the same "genteels" (wealthy Americans of leisure), including artists and writers, who went to places like the Hudson River Valley, Niagara Falls, and the White Mountains of NH in the 1800s to experience the "sublime" American landscape. According to Weeks, Gettysburg has since the battle been operating in a strange market where the sacred and the secular are advertised at the same time.

Weeks writes that the National Park Service is currently working on a "restoration" project in the battlefields, in which they will remove 576 acres of "non-historic trees," re-plant 115 acres of "historic" trees, and replace 160 acres of orchards, using ornamental instead of fruit-bearing trees. They will also maintain firewood lots and thickets to appear as they did during battle. Says Weeks in his book, "What visitors will see is not the 1863 battlefield, but a hyperreal version of it that conforms to their image of the original. The simulation will be an 'airbrushed' improvement on the original without authentic blemishes or unpleasantries."

The NPS is doing this to enhance people's "experience" of the battle, to create a sanitized and, dare I say it, a "Disney-fied" version of history. Weeks mentions that the newfound interest in this kind of restoration comes from visitor's preconceived notions of what they will see at the battlefields, thanks to film series like Ken Burns' Civil War and the book The Killer Angels.

Good stuff. It's getting me thinking.

Missing monuments and Maps

Apologies for the poor quality images (I'm still figuring out the best way to photograph these pictures on glass), but I'd like people's thoughts on what I've been doing since I got home from the residency. I've been taking my panoramas of Gettysburg battlefields and very carefully scratching off the emulsion, removing all of the monuments. Other than the multitude of souvenir stores and museums in town, the only signifiers on the actual landscapes where the battles took place are the thousands of stone monuments scattered about. The monuments are put here for a variety of reasons: to note regiment movements on a particular day, to mark the location where a general was wounded, to celebrate a calvary unit, etc. Now is an odd time for the battlefield because the park service is working to "restore" the landscape to how it looked during 1863. They are cutting down full stands of trees so that visitors can see a more "realistic" view of the pastures that existed during the battle. However, they're conspicuously leaving one thing that was definitely not there at the time: the monuments. If the monuments weren't there, I wonder how that would affect people's views of the landscape, and the history of what happened here. So, I decided to scratch them out of the pictures I took. The strange thing that I wasn't expecting is that the monuments now seem to have MORE presence in the image. This is all a continuation of my exploration of how landscape and memory are intertwined.

I am now also looking quite a bit at maps. I've always been attracted to maps and mapping, and as a kid I would spend hours poring over maps of farwaway places and planning hypothetical trips to them. On day 1 we'd go here. On day 2 we'd take Route whatever south to this place and hike this trail, etc. I still do this kind of thing (and I can't wait to get a handheld GPS unit so I can go geocaching!). Anyway, as a way of exploring all of the various landscapes I've called home over the years, I've begun planning for a series I call "personal conquests." Using USGS topographical maps of the areas I've lived in, I'm zooming into the areas where I used to live and imagining "conquests" and "defenses" of these properties. When you go to a place like Gettysburg (or if you open a social studies textbook from high school) you see lots of maps with red and blue lines and arrows that represent troop movements on them, like the one seen here printed in a TravelBrains guide. I've always been intrigued with maps like this, and I want to play with the very male, western notion of ownership and property (and the way we play "war," as kids and as adults), while at the same time exploring the "lay of the land" in the places I've lived. I've lived in seven or eight different places over the years, having never really felt like any of them were permanent (except for now, a little bit more so). How would the slope of the land affect how my hypothetical "army" would attack, and defend, the lands I have called home? So far I've only made a couple mock-ups of this using transparency paper and sharpies, but I am planning on making large-scale versions with Japanese paper and encaustics. Below are two of the places I've lived: Littlestown, PA and Crawford Notch, NH.

The joys of abstract map symbols...

as seen by the folks at The Onion. Love it.

Concentric Circles

Meeting with Mentor

A special thanks to Liz Unterman, my new mentor and Education Coordinator at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, for meeting with me last evening (and for a wonderfully strong cup of coffee to boot!). Liz's personal work deals with many of the same issues I'm working with (place and how it affects identity, and vice versa) and so her comments will definitely help to refine my concepts. Looking forward to a great semester!

Semester Reflection/Future Plans

3rd Residency Summary
Kevin Gray

In the town I used to live in, there is a foot race called the Pit Run in which I have participated. It isn’t a particularly long race – only ten kilometers – but the way in which the race is laid out makes it seem significantly longer. About two and a half kilometers into the race, the path leaves the flat roads of the valley and begins to rise eight hundred feet or so into the surrounding hills. The halfway point of the race is reached at the top of a very steep hill, where a state college campus overlooks the countryside. For every runner who enters this race, reaching this pinnacle is an important milestone, because he or she knows that “it’s all downhill from here.” And while the downhill portion may be a little bit harder on the knees, it is a refreshing feeling to know that from here on to the finish, the heart won’t be beating quite so hard and that every stride of the legs will be longer. Once the top of the great hill is reached, every runner knows that their chances of making it to the finish line are greatly increased.

I have just reached the middle of the 2 year-long MFA program at the Art Institute of Boston and a similar feeling as above has come over me. The amount of information I’ve taken in during the past year, and the sheer volume of artwork I have created and how it has been enriched, seem absolutely overwhelming when I think about it. The first semester was basically an open invitation for me to experiment, to use any materials I wanted to explore and to investigate a series of subject matter to find common threads between theme and medium. I created Polaroid emulsion lifts, charcoal drawings, tintypes, and photos using liquid emulsion on glass. Subjects in these works included cityscapes, still lifes from an antique store, mannequin portraits, and photographs of an abandoned hotel. The second semester was more of an uphill battle as I fought to streamline my work in terms of both medium and theme. With the indispensable help of my advisor Jesseca Ferguson and artist mentor Fawn Potash, I decided to narrow my exploration to two series: a group of framed mannequin tintypes and a series of landscape panoramas of Gettysburg printed on glass. The tintype images were created to explore nostalgia in art as it related to portraiture, and how both memory and photography create artificial histories in their own ways. The landscape images were the beginning stages of another examination of nostalgia, and how certain American landscapes are recreated and preserved to record a particular moment in time. An important aspect to these works for me is the ability to speak about nostalgia without becoming purely nostalgic. These are the two bodies of work I displayed at the latest residency in January.

The most burning question on my mind as this semester began was, how do these disparate-looking series of work find a common ground (if at all), and would it be reasonable to attempt to tie both works together in a final thesis? It turns out, perhaps not surprisingly, that there were a multitude of answers to this question given to me by my peers and the professors at AIB. Some thought that it was completely possible to do so (and one professor even believed that a third project may be necessary to neatly tie it all together). Others, however, felt that coalescing both projects into one tidy thesis would be as likely as, say, effectively injecting a sports metaphor into a written report about contemporary art. If one reads the first paragraph of this paper again, it can be pretty well deduced which direction I have chosen to take. It could very well be all downhill from here.

Over the next six months I will work to further develop both the tintypes and the images on glass. I feel that both series could become very strong work, and for that reason I choose not to abandon either of them. In fact, I have a third project in mind that may help to tie the projects together, one that involves maps and mapmaking, and I do intend to explore this one during the semester as well. By the end of the semester, when my thesis outline is due, I will have developed through my work a clear answer as to what my thesis should include, and what it should not.

What follows is a list of opinions, suggestions, and questions posed to me by students and faculty at the January residency:

· Explore the idea of landscape as a place that people connect to. Why is there an emotional charge? – John Kramer
· The mannequin tintypes can be pushed farther, add more extravagant layers to the images – JK
· There is a peculiar contrast and resonance between the tintype and the mannequin. This could be enhanced by printing larger – JK
· The theme of landscape is “safer” – JK

· Work on more coherence with the tintypes, making them seem more convincing of a time period and of a cared-for, loved portrait – Jesseca Ferguson

· Nostalgia can be a tricky subject. Focus on it very deeply in both series, or just choose one series so it becomes more manageable – Sunanda Sanyal
· Explore a layered, critical approach to nostalgia through the history of American photography – SS
· The mannequin is iconic and waiting to be written about by someone, but there are richer elements in my landscape images – SS
· Is it necessary to appropriate work and processes of the past to speak about the past? – SS
· Why is America nostalgic about our history while others may not be? – SS
· Look at Hudson River School painters, Native American photography, etc. – SS
· Do not get caught up in institutional (restorative) nostalgia; keep focus on personal (reflective) nostalgia – SS
· Be cold and analytical when exploring these themes, or else face the danger of the “tearful journey” during thesis presentation – SS

· In the landscape images, do more exploration of the way history can be remembered or forgotten and how this affects the landscape – Melissa Good

· Break the boundaries in terms of both series. The tintypes should be “kitschy as hell,” by adding more elements and stretching out beyond the limits of the frames. The landscape images, as well, are too controlled. Try changing the distance between panes of glass, breaking the glass, printing images as a negative, etc. – Oscar Palacio

· Use nostalgia as the tying thread between projects. When thinking about the series, place nostalgia at the top of the list and then put three words under nostalgia for each series that describes how they differ – Deb Todd Wheeler
· Instead of choosing just one series to focus on, perhaps a third project is needed to tie things together better – DTW
· Explore “applied” history and the relationship to fakery – DTW

· Make the mannequins stand out more; add more info to the tintype to compete with info in the frame – Kate Philbrick

· Play with scale in both the tintypes and landscapes – Deborah Davidson

· The tintypes have room to grow, while the landscapes seem resolved – Laurel Sparks
· Exploit the imperfections in the photographs on glass – LS


Here are suggested artists and authors to explore:

Artists –
Joseph Cornell
Mildred Howard
Gary Winogrand
Barbara Bosworth
Joseph Sudek
Marcel Broodthaers
Native American photographers
Hudson River School painters
Jeremy Lepisto
Mary van Cline
Deborah Muirhead
Lauren Fensterstock
Sally Mann
James Casebere
Lorna Simpson
Maya Lin

Authors –
Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory
Kate Harmon, You Are Here
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime
Kenneth Clark, Landscape Into Art
James Young, The Texture of Memory
Lucy Lippard, Overlay

Tired, but a GOOD tired

A million gazillion thank yous to everyone for what was undoubtedly the best MFA residency yet. I'm thankful to be part of such a dedicated, talented group of students and professors. Now the task is to keep the ball rolling now that I'm back at home in NY. I was telling some friends of mine that in some ways it feels like I've been sucked into a sort of black hole because there's so much less culture here where I live than what I was experiencing in Boston for ten days. Gone is the constant discussion of art and art theory. Gone is the waking up and seeing art on walls for twelve hours a day. The blogs everyone in the program keeps, and our Super (Tired) Group page on Flickr are going to be very important to me for the next six months.

I've already started fiddling with my landscapes on glass. Been scratching emulsion off with an exacto knife. It feels good to have artists' materials in my hands again.

And I think I've got a mentor for the semester! Liz Untermann is the Education Coordinator at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and an artist in her own right. Once her portfolio is approved by AIB, we're ready to go!

Happy working, everyone! Hope you all got home safe and sound.