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.
During my stay at the property, I created an installation that 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 overlaid soft, transparent topographical maps from the FOR-Site archives. With the concept of a mobile viewing screen as a way to place myself in this specific topography, I installed maps on top of the grounds and hung them as panels. Though these visual tools gestured towards an aspect of representation, they could not capture complexities of this dynamic landscape. It was through my own experience of recording the subtleties of time, place, matter that I created my own map - which was a constellation of just parts.
