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.