FIELD NOTES

While an Artist in Residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock this summer, I continued to work on the series Memories: No Instructions for Assembly. This series which has morphed into six evolving iterations - IIIIIIIVV, and VI is born from my family's experience with displacement and loss. There is limited photographic evidence that my family ever existed. Photographs were lost when we were unlawfully removed from our home in 1998. Some photographs were water-damaged or accidentally trashed before we packed seven lives and accompanying articles into a burgundy station wagon and made our home in a 450-square foot illegal attachment where my grandfather died, alone, nine years prior of stomach cancer. An attempt to conjure my family back into existence, in Memories: No Instructions for Assembly, I weave together orphaned photographs found at garage sales, photos stolen from the Facebook pages of estranged family members, magazine pages, water-damaged images salvaged during my family's 10-year bout with homelessness, and original photography to re-imagine a lost family history. Working in the tradition of the archaeologist and the archivist, I sample as well as reorganize existing materials into a series of images to produce a non-linear narrative that dances between vivid and vague memories. 
As I worked through this series, I kept a daily process journal using instagram and tumblr. I attempted to repurpose these social media tools to create an archive of my discovery, research, and difficulties. My work is an excavation of memories. As an art of excavation, I am concerned with making both my process and product visible. My process journal In many cases, my process notes functioned as product -- final pieces. 

and pretty soon there’s my arm ! : A Field Notes baedeker by Donna Fleischer On assignment in the Exit Strata Field Notes office sans walls. Mountain air and wild clover nitrogen sacs beneath rockshelf. Fertility Wampum. Barefoot through their unseen globules, nodules, atop sandy patterns the width and wavinesses of a snake’s movements, as in many Navaho textile weavings, as are the photograms of Adam Fuss. How I try to mostly (write) now, undulate, corporealize and scrabble across this Connecticut steppe and mountain ridge meadow. Morning blueberries, raw almonds, coffee, black cat, garter snake, mockingbirds swoop and dip into the small clover clumps; read mainstay poets with field glasses and compass ~ Charlie Mehrhoff, Amy King, Karma Tenzing Wangchuk, purple crown vetch and a stand of Queen Anne’s Lace tall from rain, Noelle Kocot, Ana Božičević, Tim Trace Peterson, Filip Marinovich, Tyrone McDonald, David Pontrelli, mountain winds, CAConrad, Anne-Adele Wight, bird squawks, Scott Watson, Bob Arnold, Ariana Reines, Christina Pacosz, Lynn Behrendt, marlene mountain, just can’t name them all ~. My neighbor April just came home in her red Beetle. Its motor purrs. The weather is magnanimous. Here’s the skull of Phineas Gage, poor man, lodged in my brain. I retrieve the railroad tie, place it in the ground, as totem. Who is to know how it all begins, goes forth, stumbles along, falls and crawls back with earthworm writhe to write.

Every now and again, as I walk around these not-so-pristine streets, my eye will catch something small, some strange forgotten detail on a building facade and it will tell me to record it in some way, sketch or otherwise, in order for it not to be forgotten entirely.  Other times, my forehead opens up and things fall out and I'll need a place to catch them.Most often though, the idle thoughts that pass through typically revolve around or revolve in some kind of environment, not necessarily a building, maybe a set of buildings, or a wilderness, none of which exist in the proper sense, and therefore need to find space on a notebook page.  The design process that has sort of formed itself within me over the years took a narrative turn while I was working on my master's degree.  The sense that buildings and environments needed to be created through the positivist flow seemed to be too limited and cold for my tastes and the only way to find new opportunities in design would be to come at it from the other side. Or from underneath, as the case may be.  This lead me towards intuition, accident, error, and then eventually to poetry, though I far from consider myself to be any kind of poet.

Editor's update: our man in Alaska is in the midst of tonnes of tuna...er, sockeye salmon... you get the drift: a lot of fish. He reports fatigue of the almost unbelievably backbreaking variety, the type that relies on dogged perseverance alone. As has happened to all of us in these simultaneously frustrating and invigorating times, writing falls by the wayside... but in the service of satisfying, seemingly "real" work, wherein the mind enters a nearly zen state and stops getting in the way. Somehow, to spend a few moments looking, depicting in film or pen and ink doesn't require the same effort as words so a few drawings pepper the spaces between. We congratulate Jacob, his dad, and their team on a banner harvest. He writes:  I can hardly move right now. It is a record breaking year so far. We've been open for the last eight days straight and will probably not close until the first of August. I can't really relate to you how tired I am at this point but we're almost half way through the season and we are destroying past seasons. I won't sleep for the next two weeks probably. It's been about as many preceding today. If I could write I would, but I can't. One thing on my mind right now: working through it.

Other than that I am extremely high on adrenaline right now and excited as hell to continue working. We are doing quite well as far as the price is concerned. Holding at 1.45/lb. We'll have 100,000 lbs by the end of this show.
 
ED: Every time you eat a sandwich, or sushi, of sea-caught fish of any kind, there are humans on a boat working grueling hours to provide you with that privilege. Stay abreast of the illusions of too-easy consumption.
 

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