Crossing

(Original exhibition title: As the Crow Flies)

The phrase “as the crow flies” refers to a path one cannot follow, an inaccessible view. It’s a route that cuts through perceived gaps, untraversable spaces in the landscape. Humans wind their way around lakes, looking past these bodies of water to the land across. However, this isn’t possible with the Great Lakes. While land-locked, they expand beyond our scope, continuing an arduous conversation with one another that leads to the open sea.

I am tracing a body by its obstruction; the body as it is held in a body of water – as the water is formed by how it is held in the land. I am thinking about the secrecy of our presence in a landscape, how we lie in it, how we share its elements, how we change it in unknown ways. As the Crow Flies considers how the omittance or obstruction of something becomes the signifier for its very existence; signaling a body of evidence via its obstruction.

There are stories that are told without retelling and while they imbue themselves into our identities and into how we see the world, they remain outwardly inexplicable. This exhibit ponders how a secret is kept; how it is retold internally, preserved but mutating without validation or correction, a re-imagined memory of another’s experience. We ourselves become secret - we are unknown. What is the conduct of confidentiality? How do we honor, protect, preserve a tale without giving it away? In this sense, I am trying to transcribe muteness in mass.

Once a story is told, it is no longer in our domain. It can run. And shift into unforeseeable outcomes.