Some landscapes are celebrated as sacred
sites because of the stories that are told about them, whereas others are
marked as horrific sites of tragedy, humiliation, and cultural shame. To the
uninformed eye, both places look the same—expansive, hilly, idyllic—which
attests to the notion that every landscape is not just a physical place, but is
also what theologian Belden Lane calls a “storied place.”
For American Tragedy Sites, first I
research the historic place, and then I sketch, take photographs, and paint it.
I finish the composition in my studio by mixing the rendered landscape with a
totem of other symbols and nonobjective spaces.
Through the languages of realist landscape painting and
religious icon-painting, I aim to honor these shadowed lands as holy lands, and
to disturb conventional distinctions between what is sacred and what is
shameful.
I believe certain landscapes offer insight into how we
grapple with tragedy. Some sites of cultural shame are hidden away, avoided, or
“obliterated,” to use geographer Kenneth Foote’s term. These sorrow-filled
sites can get lost often by hiding in plain sight. For example, guests can pass
through the old Hyatt Hotel lobby in Kansas City, drink coffee and mingle, and
never know about the event that happened there in 1981—”the worst structural
disaster in American history!” There is no plaque, no memorial, no spot to lay
flowers or light candles. The historic event, then, is more easily
forgotten.
This intentional oversight or forgetting happens all the
time. If the memory attached to the site is too painful, or too shaming,
the culture will attempt to erase it by re-landscaping or by destroying
records. Salem, for example, kept no official record of the small hill where
nineteen victims of the witchcraft scare were executed, so today its exact
location is unknown. Likewise, the fence where Matthew Shepard was killed in
Laramie, Wyoming, was promptly removed and the street names were changed to
confuse tourists (“Out of sight, out of mind”). In both cases, the true
location of the historic event lives on only in hearsay.
But now we have GPS, and landscapes push back, and people
get behind them and lobby to have them preserved. The Minidoka Japanese
Internment Camp site in south central Idaho, a true national shame site, was
converted into farmland and torn down as quickly as it was constructed. But
activists got funding and rebuilt its barbed-wire fence and ominous watchtower,
two important communicators of the daily psychological experience of the
Japanese-Americans imprisoned there during WWII. A few other elements of the
Minidoka landscape remain: Fujitaro Kubota’s eerie rock garden, dusty
labyrinthian pathways, the scorching sun, rushing river, and desert indifference.
If for some reason the actual tragedy site is truly lost or
inaccessible, a culture will construct a miniature version, a memorial across
the street. In the case of Matthew Shepard’s memorial, it is a bench at the
university miles away. But there are also memorial gardens, parks, museums, and
trees! There are memorial trees, like the prayer tree in the center of the
killing fields of the Bear River Massacre site, probably the greatest forgotten
Indian massacre in American military history. “The first and the worst,”
and it’s also easily one of the most beautiful landscapes and memorials I have
ever seen. The place is woven into a wide river valley in the foothills of the
Rockies, swarming with wildlife, flowers, and hot springs (the Shoshoni vacationed
there every winter). The tree is somewhat hidden next to others behind the
official, unimpressive, monolithic memorial standing in a gravel parking lot
next to a trash can. The tree’s lower half is covered in freshly made dream
catchers, medicine bundles, stuffed animals, beaded necklaces, colored flags,
and gem stones. Buckets full of toys and chewing tobacco hang from branches
near the trunk.
Every January the surviving Shoshoni and others gather at
the tree, refresh the offerings, and pray that the Warm Dance will happen again
one day.
No comments:
Post a Comment