play 'art history' as you browse

The first iteration of the topographic coat is an experiment and meditation across the bounds of heritage, colonial ancestry, and 'rights' to place. Having been held by many geographies that made space for me to be at home, I wanted to confront the implications of topographic renderings - their beauty and some variation of wisdom, and their technocratic insistences and certainties. I wanted to play with unraveling that certainty, while distorting the 'knowing' of place, and letting both the unmapped topographies of this textile (eco-fi felt) and my body embed a re-rendering of the topographic lines generated for a topographic map of Black Mountain, Missouri.

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Black Mountain is the tallest point in the vicinity in which my maternal grandfather accumulated enough wealth to purchase land - a property my family lovingly refers to as Marble Creek. Growing up along the creek and among its meadows and forests in the shadow of Black Mountain is one of only two plots of land that I've known since birth that I still have the ability to revisit. It was essential to me that I begin developing this series of coats here, on land I have a history with and whose indigenous history I hardly know.

 

If I encounter its renderings from a bird-or-satellite's view, if I wrap myself in that heavenly gaze, or interrupt its romanticizing and deconstruct the omnipresence of such surveillance technologies, might I step more towards an embodiment of heritage that not only confronts but demands a contention of multitudes?

Can I turn back from here?