END OF THE NORTH WOODS
This series explores how the mythology of wilderness is commodified, and how that commodity can outlive the wild spaces it references.
I currently live at the southern fringes of Wisconsin’s North Woods in a small town that was built up by lumber barons. It is historically where a great northern pine forest met with oak savannahs, and later where untold amounts of lumber were sent down smaller rivers to the Mississippi. The North Woods “feel” is largely gone, but monuments to logging, lumberjacks, & voyageurs, are commonplace. Now that the idea of this place as the start of the great North Woods is relatively abstract, these monuments give a specificity and a sense to tourists that they have “arrived.”
The story of Paul Bunyan may or may not have circulated widely in the logging camps of the 19th century, but most of the remaining Bunyan stories were created by an ad writer for a lumber company in the 1930s. These manufactured mythologies were likely not ever “believed” outside of any capitalist aims and have been termed “fakelore” due to their origin and primary use in advertisement. Bunyan himself is tall, energized and sunny – an image of masculine self-reliance that spoke first to (white) American men of the 20th century who felt nostalgic for a less urban, industrial world.
In reality, the lumber camps of the Upper Midwest were full of immigrants, many of whom were terrified by their dangerous work. Their height, on average, was 5’4”. Those who survived to old age were often eager to never step foot in the wilderness again. Bunyan is a gross caricature that I cannot find much interest in. I relate much more to the actual men who worked in these camps, both due to my literal height (5’4”) and in their terror. My fears around nature are different in that I’m braced for a remaining lifetime of climate chaos, not a falling widow maker. Still, I’m similarly a pawn in a system that is causing ecological devastation and am largely powerless to stop it.
This series contains digital collages, photographs, and videos. The collages explored the mythologized apocalyptic end of the North Woods, each piece showing a seasonless collection of plants, smoke and ice. The photographs show the more literal boundary of the North Woods, but also show the banal disruption that follows major ecological devastation. The videos explore my interest in fakelore and how it gets adopted into 21st century culture.
MYTH OF THE FLAT WORLD
A landscape can be read like a text, each element revealing a piece of a narrative. Weeds can tell stories of traveling across continents and displacing other species to dominate their new terrains. Cultivated plants have survived and spread partially through their seduction of human beings, and some animal species are now believed to have partially domesticated themselves. Landscape is something constructed, piece by piece, by many different players.
This body of work explores this built aspect of the environment by following the same basic structure as millefleur tapestries. Each work is assembled flower by flower so that the final image contains dozens of individual photographs. Native species mix with non-native and even invasive plants, as do human and animal elements.
PLASTICENE
Plastic objects have centuries-long lifespans, meaning they will outlive us and become our most visible artifacts. Because of this, we could be considered to be living in a Plasticene era, a term used by some geologists to describe this period dominated by plastic waste. The bags in my series Plasticene have been shaped to reference art & artifacts from the past, as they will one day fulfill the same basic role that pottery & sculpture previously have in memorializing an era. The plastic forms in these images float above waves, creating new pseudo-mythological scenes over the waters of my native Great Lakes region.
ARCADIA
During the Renaissance, the Arcadia region of Greece was often portrayed in art and literature as a perfect and unspoiled wilderness. In this fictional Arcadia, men lived in harmony with the landscape and other animals. Even in our own time, there exists a sense of a time in the past where human beings lived in some kind of Eden before our own nature forced us out.
The work in Arcadia focuses instead on the push/pull relationship that humans have with the rest of the natural world. While there is comfort in existing above and largely outside of nature’s very real and painful cycles, there’s also an equal but opposing longing to reconnect with them. Because of this, a lot of my work addresses the meeting place between “human” and “natural” places and states of being. Even the human body can be seen as a hybridized space between humanity and animality, since the experience and discomfort of having a body connects us so strongly to other animals.