On view:

April 12 – June 7, 2019

2900 Detroit Avenue

Cleveland, OH 44113

An Exhibition of photographs and printed ephemera with a video essay at its center, Casual Water threads various points of view to tell the story of an abandoned country club. Through interviews and multiple digressions, personal histories reshape an initial view of the landscape. What starts as a microcosmic study of a few acres morphs into larger themes regarding fragility of memory and the impermanence of natural spaces.

Bill Barrow explains, "That’s the whole idea of a palimpsest – Rather than throwing away expensive parchment, somebody would sand it off and reuse it. Lots of works of antiquity have been recovered by being able to read what was on that lower level of the stack. So, you can borrow that term and use it for almost any kind of document that has layers of information."

"First it's raw land owned by somebody and gradually, all of a sudden, you come up through the palimpsest of different maps. You can start to see, there’s the country club, and now of course we’re seeing Walmart as the latest layer of that stack of views. But it all leaves a record behind."

My photographs of the abandoned golf course seemed to end at wanderlust and escapism. They didn’t seem to show any place in specific and really just reminded me that I was hiding from reality, sort of using the space for my own artistic gain. But maybe I was learning something. There’s an importance to getting lost, learning about a place by being there physically, experiencing it with all of the senses.

Rebecca Solnit wrote, “Explorers were at home in the unknown. For though the particular place might be unknown to them, the wild was in many cases their chosen residence. Explorers were always lost because they’d never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were.”

Rick told me that when he was little, Cleveland was everything: "When I come up, I used to run around and jump on trees and climb trees. Matter of fact, back in the olden days which was back in the 60s, I used to go from yard to yard, I could jump from one garage to another garage, all the way down the street and never touch the ground. But then when I got a little older, everything kind of changed. Most of your peach trees are gone, the houses burnt up, people destroying everything. We had a lot of riots back then. And after all that, when everything calmed down, the community got itself back together."

I was making cyanotypes on the golf course. I set the coated paper in the tall grass, and waited a few minutes before collecting them. I wanted to make photographs of time, something harder to see than the thing itself. And I did collect things too, trying to catalog what I was experiencing here and now. Time capsules.

There is a Japanese phrase, Mono no Aware, that, like a lot of Eastern ideas, doesn’t exactly translate to the English language. It’s an awareness of the impermanence of all things, a gentle sadness about this fact of life. But this melancholy sigh is also infused with a quiet joy, an appreciation for ephemeral beauty and the bittersweet love for the fleeting people and things that have graced our lives. A symbol of this mood is the cherry blossom tree, beautiful not in relation to the aesthetic qualities of other trees, rather in its transient nature of its blossoms, which wilt and fall to the ground within a week of budding.

I thought of myself as an invasive species. While on a winter trip to Saint Petersburg, Russia, I was searching for toska with my camera, another word without an English translation. A phrase that plagued me. Something that I thought I needed to find over there, something that couldn’t be found here and now, I supposed.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote, "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness.”

In the end, I found less in the distanced portraits of Russian strangers than I did with my own neighbors and my own story.

Casual Water is a term for temporary water hazards during the play of golf: a puddle due to inclement weather, low spots in the course terrain, or even a broken sprinkler head. Something here and gone. Depending on the season or day of the week, you may or may not have crossed its path.

I thought about my grandfather. He’d led two lives with two families. At his funeral, there were two photo-displays. One in the lobby, designed by my, I guess, step grandmother, and the other edited by dad, beside the casket where my dad also stood, greeting everyone for the entirety of the viewing. So, for a few hours, right at the end, those two lives, or paths intersected.