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