Permanent Collection, South Bend Museum of Art, South, Bend, IN.
South Bend Museum of Art, South Bend, IN. Solo exhibition, March 10 - July 8, 2012.
Messenger (2012)
Single-channel HD video, stereo
Digitized photograph, digitized archive film, animated text, sampled sound.
I began work on Messenger in response to a call for exhibition entries that occurred just as I was putting up my 2012 solo show at the South Bend Museum of Art. Given time constraints, I worked with elements acquired from my earlier videos hoping to build a collage that might succeed on purely formalistic grounds, if nothing else. But the composition soon acquired a surprisingly personal edge. The flat Kansas maize field is the same as many in which my dad and I hunted pheasant and quail in the early ‘60s. The locomotive drive wheel is to me emblematic of the Kansas political and religious culture of that time, steeped in the acceptance of all manner of modernist notions of industrial progress, societal improvement, scientific advances, etc. The dogmatic text from a political speech by Calvin Coolidge resonates in tone and content with the drive wheel. Seeing this piece now across the span of several years, I discover that it has become a solid memory, as real as anything I encountered in that time and place.