WHERE STORIES REPEAT THEMSELVES
The land is a physical story that is constantly being rewritten and revised. This story that we are all a part of is radically shifting. Whole narratives are being deleted at an alarming rate. While many of us are often preoccupied with these large shifts, the smaller more nuanced changes to our stories can be overlooked. It is often beyond the personal power of the individual to stop these revisions to the land around us, the least we can do is document and remember.
Where Stories Repeat Themselves is a memorial to the land around me. This video montage is a reflection of a personal archive of experience. The videos were collected over three years on roadtrips through Colorado, Nebraska, Utah, New Mexico, Kansas, Missouri and Texas. These videos span a variety of moments and landscapes, from lightning in the Rocky Mountain National Park, salamanders in Nebraska, coastal marshland in Texas, and cows crossing an irrigation ditch in Colorado.
The videos have been blurred and integrated with monotypes - the monotypes were created through intuitive additive and reductive mark making with water-based ink on a plexi plate and then printed. The act of creating the monotypes, the instances of reflection that were integral in their making, allows me to further imbed the memory and experience of these moments into my psyche. By digitally blending the physical monotype with video I am shifting the focus from the actual experience to the memory and reflection of the experience. When the small things, the stories of the land that are important to us on a personal level, are gone, the memory will remain.
“... I got back in our van a little stunned, driving away wondering if there are happenstances in the land, places where stories repeat themselves. It is where the air changes densiity, where we stroll through ghosts.”
- Craig Childs, Virga and Bone
Stills from Where Stories Repeat Themselves, 5:20, 2020
Video, 05:20, 2020
Where Stories Repeat Themselves - monotypes / 6 in x 6 in / 2019 - 2020