Artist Statement

     These pieces use Emerson's essay, "Fate," to consider urban dislocation. The land around the abandoned Ralph Waldo Emerson Elementary School in Pontiac, Michigan, will be repurposed to a “tiny houses” development, with affordable prices and a sustainable energy system. This project is led by the Micah 6 Community, a grassroots organization devoted to social justice and economic security. Thus, the series eschews nostalgia, while acknowledging the haunting presence of forgotten lives. As Emerson understood, melancholy hides in hope.With the exception of "Louis," each construction has a title derived from a line in Emerson's essay. While large format photographs are the raw material for the contact prints, meaning emerges from assemblage. The series uses repetition, spatial disruption, defacement, and displacement to convey the dialectical relationship between decay and emergence. Cyanotype is the necessary medium for this sense, since it emphasizes the obscurity and distance inherent in every mechanically recorded image, but often repressed by the pursuit of simulated imaginary perfection.  

     I return to Emerson because, by way of chance, my neighbors in the Micah 6 Community inherited his namesake school, soon to be tractored out by Cats. The buildings are burned, windows broken, fences torn, scrapped out, left to rot. Kids climb through blackened apertures with bags of weed, condoms and 40s. Punks tag the bones. Louis chases, follows until the trail turns dry, calls the cops, though they’ve never nabbed a vandal. Emerson protects her prowlers. Louis drills out the lock, raccoon skulls cracking under his kicks as he patrols mildew and ash. Another year, maybe two, the haunted halls will fade to dust, in their place, little houses, and Louis, local George Bailey, busting Potter’s bile against an iron optimism always verging on suicidal madness. In this, he is more wave than particle, interference pattern passing through the slit, merging and ebbing with the others, Coleman, Bethany, Carrie, Katie, Dylan, Emma, southern transplants, anti-colonialists, standing upon a platform without a party, in the pocket of capital and machetes unsheathed for Christ. 

     Micah 6 moves one brick at a time in order to move the world. Thus they circle back to Emerson, even unknowing. As he puts it, in “Fate,” “To me…the question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live? We are incompetent to solve the times. Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their opposition.” This is, of course, the voice of an older man, broken in capacity, but fueled by the same vital aspirations that made “Self-Reliance” possible in youth. Now he says to his younger avatar: “We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping-out in our planted gardens of the core of the world. No picture of life can have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts. A man’s power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he touches on every side, until he learns its arc.” Micah 6 are incompetent to solve the times, but they build shelter for the storm, even if every brick eventually chars beneath the arc of necessity. 

Source: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fate,” in The Conduct of Life (Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1883 [1860]).  

May/June 2024