New exhibit: Landscapes of ancestral migration
Wilhelm and Augusta make a life for themselves in Iowa. From: Landscapes of Ancestral Migration at the Durham Arts Council’s Allenton Gallery, 30 September through 21 November 2022.
My ancestors drew me to landscapes they inhabited before and after over a hundred of them emigrated from Europe to this continent during the 17th, 19th, and 20th centuries. I traveled to and photographed these landscapes in the Netherlands, Germany, and England, on one side of the Atlantic, and on the other, to Virginia, Iowa, New York, and North Carolina. In those places I often felt a quiet knowing inside myself that specific ancestors had been where I was standing, sensing their presence in the present, as I felt the hard edges of my linear sense of time dissolve.
Today, 30 September, is the first day of Landscapes of Ancestral Migration, the Durham Arts Council-sponsored solo exhibit of work created from photographs I took on these travels. In assembling pieces for this series, I aimed to re-create the time-shifting experiences I felt during my travels--printing landscape images on fabric to give them the emotional resonances of memory, and sometimes merging vintage ancestor portraits in multiple physical layers. Image fragments and unfinished edges suggest the piecemeal and dreamlike quality of memory. I left work uncovered by glass to allow viewers to experience the materiality of the pieces directly.
These images have been created in conversation with text--a book-in-progess that recounts my literal and metaphorical journeys to investigate my ancestors’ lives--both images and text have been developed under the conceptual umbrella of The Ancestor Project. What has been difficult to convey in images alone is described more clearly in this text--that is, my conflicted feelings of heartbreak and desire that the investigation into my ancestral homelands elicited. It was desire that inspired me to learn more about my ancestors and where they had lived, enamored with the natural histories and sheer beauty of ancestral homes I visited, and in some awe of the courage it must have taken to cross an ocean in a ship powered only by wind, and then later by steam.
The wonderment of their efforts and journeys, however, was tinged with the looming shadow of hunger and poverty that tore many of my hundred migrant ancestors from their families and homes in Europe. And every new place my ancestors settled was or had been in the throes of Native genocide, to make room for white colonial settlers--my ancestors. I felt too conflicted to wholeheartedly celebrate their frontier stories as heroic. And yet, I needed to connect their lives to mine, to acknowledge the truths of their stories as a first step toward reckoning with the past and repair for the future.
I have found no satisfactory way to make a reckoning through the images themselves. Where relevant, however, in the text descriptions of each piece, I identify specific Indigenous nations who were on the land now known as America before my ancestors’ arrival--and describe their genocide and dispossession from the land. As I create additional work from visual materials gathered for this project, I will continue to grapple with this question--likely seeking collaboration with people with Indigenous ancestry.
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I am grateful to the Durham Arts Council for the opportunity to show this work and for the 2020 Emerging Artist Grant they gave me to support travel to one ancestral landscape. I’d like to thank Susan Tierney, their Artist Services Manager, for her help in putting my work on the walls—and all the other support it takes to put an exhibit out into the world.
The Durham Arts Council is a critical resource for the Durham arts’ community and has been an important touchstone in my own artistic life. I took my first photography course at the Durham Arts Council in 1992, where I learned how to use my Pentax K-1000 camera and to develop and print my own black and white images. I have enjoyed viewing art in their galleries over the years and hearing people such as Tommy Orange and Nikole Hannah-Jones speak to gatherings in their auditorium space. It is an honor to show my work in the Allenton Gallery.
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Please come see Landscapes of Ancestral Migration if you have the chance! As the fates would have it, the gallery is closed today due to anticipated stormy weather caused by Hurricane Ian. But it will be up for many weeks, and the artist reception is on October 21, so I will not fret about the difficulties of this first day.
If you do go, I’d love to hear from you about how you might connect to the work on a personal level. There will be directions for how to do this posted near the exhibit--and you can also comment directly here to this blogpost. At the end of the exhibit I will summarize what I get back--plus any new insights I have while it is up--in a new blogpost that I will also send directly to anyone who participates.
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May you find yourself in a landscape that brings you joy.