HIICKORY HILL
Hickory Hill’s nearly 200 acres are situated just a mile from my house. If you haven’t been, it’s a gorgeous tract of mixed woodland and prairie, with Ralston Creek gathering steam from its sloping ravines as it etches its way through the park. Cobbled together over the years through shrewd advocacy of a few and valuation of many, it is now penned in at its final size by residential development.
Last fall I began working in earnest in Hickory Hill. Admittedly always a little dismissive of plein air painting as the territory of Sunday painters, fully chagrined, I have found working outdoors with fleeting subject matter urgent and exciting – impending rain, humidity, ticks, poison ivy and icy toes, logistical challenges and great rewards. Painting provides the excuse to stay in one spot and really look, audience to the growth of plants, turning of leaves, the silent movement of barred owls and foxes, the advent of songbirds, and the tireless industry of chipmunks. Every work in this show was made outdoors on location.
The park is a bit of a violent place: snag ash trees, overgrown honeysuckle, silt filled creeks, and unrelenting storm damage as the woodland ages all at once into our unraveling climate. The morning chorus sparkles over the dull roar of engines on I-80 and the intermittent pounding of sheepsfoot rollers compacting the soil beneath encroaching development. Deer browse amidst the episodic cicada-like drone of chainsaws. The more I work in the park, the more interested I’ve become in the evidence of its inherent tension. Trees torn apart, muscled into raw, suspended gesture. Chopped logs float adrift in a sea of emerging mayapples. The seemingly endless baggies of hermetically sealed dog shit sprinkled amidst piles of cleared invasives. It all reminds us how un-wild this place is.
And yet, as compromised as the park is in its nuanced ways, how wonderful it is that the vision of our neighbors preserved it. Time spent in Hickory Hill bears witness to the breadth of its audience. The morning invites birders and warbler walks, the afternoon's spandexed joggers, shifting gradually to evening dog walkers. Children build forts and squelch in the streams on the weekends, as couples wander lost on first dates, and crews of the well intentioned clear invasive species. Mushroom hunters foraging quietly off trail amongst them all.
In a state that has handed over the vast balance of its land to line the pockets of agricultural industrialists and tailored its weak regulations to hem the bottom line for developers, Hickory Hill’s cherished whisper of wilderness reminds us of how much of our natural landscape we have lost. “This is a great place to live and it doesn’t happen by chance,” said Carrie Norton who along with her late husband Dee Norton have been vital advocates and benefactors to the park. “The way you make a community is to mobilize. A community becomes wonderful because people invest themselves and make it happen.” With its towering hickory trees, carpets of spring ephemerals, swelling oysters, glowing fall bluestem, and curiously tame deer, I am grateful for Hickory Hill’s refuge. More please.
DEVELOPMENT POTENTIAL
Commuting back and forth to Cedar Rapids, I often turned off the interstate in North Liberty to take a quick spin through farmland on my way back to Iowa City. A new high school condemned that last patch of farmland to development – the definition of “pioneering sprawl” – and I watched as a favorite farmstead was razed to the ground. The subsequent reformatting of the land has been seductively dramatic, and this fall I created work responding to the uncompromising destruction and contextless reconstruction of Scanlon Farm into Scanlon Farms North Ridge. The land was ripped open, pushed around, rebuilt, and then sutured together with black erosion fence, creating a sterilized and entirely unrecognizable topography.
I approached my work with a similar mindset, creating paintings and drawings with a process informed by the same forceful and aggressive handling of the landscape. Working on site, I sought to capture the expansive and spectacular landscapes that would often appear and disappear in the course of an afternoon. I approached larger studio works with the same kind of additive and subtractive energy and force I witnessed edit that once pastoral part of my drive. The resulting drawings and paintings depict a dramatic, transitional landscape of false geologic scale, scattered with the arbitrary punctuations of surveying flags and sewage mains.
AMERICAN LANDSCAPES
“How we represent the land to ourselves affects the ways in which we value and act upon it.”
- James Corner
Torn landscapes and built landscapes interest me. Midwestern agriculture is viewed, divergently, as either seductively bucolic or disturbingly industrial. In either case, farming in this part of the country embodies ponderous externalities of cost. In some instances, these environmental, political, and social land-use ramifications are difficult to see. In other instances, they become difficult to ignore.
Through desaturation, aggressive handling, ripping, tearing, scratching, scraping, and so on, I try to illustrate the industrialized landscape using similar processes to how it is created. It is a landscape that is, in its purest essence, brutally elegant.
Knowing the darker side of the bucolic and appreciating the aesthetic side of the industrial creates paradigms for finding the landscape’s hidden burdens and unexpected attractions. I am attempting to come to terms with a vast and alternatingly violent and beautiful landscape – one I am visually attracted to, philosophically opposed to, and entirely surrounded by.
POSTCARDS FROM IOWA
Botanical gardens provide curated spaces where we can experience a summary of the greater environments we live in. Cobbled together in one place, we can browse through a multitude of species and gain a greater understanding of the environment as a whole. Today, less than 0.1 percent of the original 28.6 million acres of Iowa prairie remain. Our native ecosystem has instead been supplanted entirely by a handful of nearly identical varietals of corn and soybeans, only distinguishable by signage and corporate logos.
Heading east from Grinnell, Iowa, on Highway 6 - or for that matter, most anywhere in the Midwest - seed demonstration plots line the highways. In a warped sense, these plant showcases are our own contemporary botanical gardens. For this series, each seed sign from Monsanto's 2008 demonstration plot has been drawn and screen printed as postcards. When we travel, we buy postcards that represent important monuments, individuals, or subtle facets of a culture, sending them back to our family and friends. I hope that you will take a postcard, mail it, and share a little bit of Iowa with someone you know. These postcards are free to take! Please pick your favorite strain and disseminate as you see fit.