TOPOGRAPHICAL EXERCISES
FOR-Site’s Nevada City property, owned by Cheryl Haines, is a fifty-acre property located on the edge of the South Yuba River gorge, just outside the historic gold-mining town of Nevada City, California. It is a frontier where forest meets urban development, indigenous history meets mining history, and where artists collaborate with the landscape. My installation positioned itself on an overlook of forest and in a location where the noise and artifacts of new development butted up against one another. As a way of locating myself as a figure in this complex environment, I approached it with a transparent set of digitally printed topographical maps that I accessed from the FOR-Site archives. With the concept of a mobile viewing screen as a way to place myself in this specific topography, I overlaid maps on top of the grounds and hung them as panels. These visual tools revealed themselves as limited in their ability to create a cohesive interpretation of the complexities of this dynamic landscape and my work excavating and responding to my experiences and studies there, generated its own map - a representation through the constellation of its parts.
