My personal geography encompasses paths shared and crossed.  The terrain is never fixed.  It is constantly shifting, revealing and layering the sense of self in relation to time and place.  I enter into these layers, by tracing landscapes from my life.

This cartography is in collaboration with my deceased father, where my memories and his footage, outline the territory for exploration.  I investigate our camping trips for clues about the Mid-western family vacation, the draw to "wild" places, and my father’s shared desire to document.

I perform large line drawings in efforts to try and catch these lost moments from twenty some years ago.  I start by projecting the home video, and walking into the light of the moving image.  My body takes on parts of the projection as I begin to actively trace the moving landscape on paper.  It is through this use of layers, that I embody and collapse the past and present.

Devote in my attempts, my process remains futile.  Like daughter, like father, the drawing is another form of documentation that still falls short of the original experience.  All memory is an act of reconstruction.

Works:

Devil's Tower National Monument, Wyoming, 1990-2014.  
Original video footage, oil stick on paper, 4 min 34 sec. May 2014.  Live performance at Heron Arts.  San Francisco, CA.

"Reconstruction: Rocky Mountain National Park: July 31, 1989 " (Video Still)  Materials: Charcoal on paper, archival family footage.  Dimensions: 5 x 4 feet drawing, 3 minutes 38 second video.  This two channel video pairs a drawing performance done from memory with the original video footage.  All acts of memory, are acts of reconstruction.

 

"The Great River Runs Black" (Video still from performance) Materials: black latex paint on wall & archival family footage.  Dimensions: 10 x 12 ft wall.  In the summer of 1992, my family ventured to Itasca State Park, in northern Minnesota.  Here lie the headwaters for a river that crawls for 2330 miles to the Gulf Coast.  The largest drainage system in North America.  The Ojibwa call is Misi-ziibi, the Great River.  As a kid, I used to brag to my friends that I crossed the Mississippi on foot.  Indeed I had, where it is only twelve feet wide.  Taking black paint, I rush to confer and conceal this place.  November 2014.