Where I grew up,
there once was a pretty yellow Victorian house on a corner lot, quietly surrounded by old trees. Its grandeur was a bit out of place in our small town. I used to pine after it in the backseat of the car as a child, because I liked looking at pretty things and imagining myself as among them.
One day, in a striking moment, the old house was torn down and replaced overnight by a gray box, built out of cinderblocks and filled with Domino’s Pizza. Pizza said the old house was rumored to have had an unmanageable infestation of brown recluse spiders. “Good riddance,” Pizza said. I only heard a shout in a crowd of soft conversation.
I spent the first 24 years of my life living in Tennessee, and I chose to leave it for reasons I don’t fully understand yet. But the landscape of the American South remains a continuous fascination of mine. There is more subtlety to human existence in the rural landscape. Development takes its time, and memories aren’t frequently bulldozed into oblivion. Instead, they are more often clumsily erased just enough to be repurposed into something else, leaving behind a residue.
The language of progress in big cities is a shouting match with so many voices competing that the saturated ear hears only a monotone. In the expansive space of the rural United States, however, it’s easier to hear those voices speak individually. The language of progress there is bold, awkward and genuine as people learn to speak it in more isolation. I find our history in that conversation easier to trace and thus easier to face. Without deafening noise, I can hear the sentiments as they change. Or as they don’t. I can hear them as they are.
I am an artist who currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. I received my BFA from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 2014. My work is young, and it explores the American landscape as a recording of collective memory. It lives in my studio and buzzes when I walk into the room. There it is mine, and here it is ours.