I was born and raised in “the Land of 10,000 Lakes,” but what
I remember most are the trees. (This is something you’ll hear me say a lot.)
I’ve spent more years away from Minnesota than I ever lived
there. Despite this, I still identify strongly with “being Minnesotan,” being
from a small town, and being from my small town in particular. Recently, a work
colleague mentioned that his wife is Minnesotan, and in our discussion we ended
up looking up my old town and street address on Google Earth. I recognized my neighbors’ houses, despite the
years that have passed, but I couldn’t recognize my old house. I didn’t expect
the new owners to keep things the same, but I wasn’t expecting it to look so
totally different. It was like getting punched in the chest—this alien
landscape that ate up my memories. It gave me chills. They’d taken out all the
trees.
My childhood home—and certainly my childhood town—are not
the same. I’m not the same either, for that matter. Although I maintain some
legacy speech patterns (such as a tendency to omit particles and the occasional
interjected “Eh?”), I lost my accent a long time ago.
The place is changed, and I’ve changed. What makes up my
identity is less traditionally defined by a geographic location or a group of
people than by a particular period in time at a particular physical location.
While it existed, the moment has passed, even though the place and the actors
are still around.
The voiceprint marks a particular moment in time, sans my
sadly gone accent, parsed into two phrases: “What I remember most / are the
trees” repeated in pattern. The phrases take on the persona of the trees that
once inhabited my front yard. The photo is a brushstroke filtered image of the “new”
version of my old home, taken from Google Earth, rendered in black and white to
enhance the sense of nostalgia.
If I were to make this image the beginning of a series of
work, I would call the sequence Displacement.
too cool : )
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