Artist Statement:

The expression “gone to seed” is an agricultural idiom without precise definition. Referring to the stage of development in which a crop has exhausted its potential and become weak and devitalized, it implies carelessness and neglect as the catalyst of decline. It follows that this characterization is an apt description of the forgotten places and cultures that have been rooted in these agrarian economies. Despite its negative connotations, “gone to seed” allows for the possibility of rejuvenation in the sense that as a crop passes into the seed-bearing stage, it carries with it the potential to give birth to the succeeding generation. This duality is the locus of the simple performance within the piece that intimately addresses our troubled relationship with the places to which we belong.

At the height of its popularity, the relevance of the panoramic image was in the ability of the medium to question the individual’s place in the world or the community. The rapid growth of the city disoriented the populous and prompted a desire to re-appropriate and “fix” the urban expanse which, when they were in it, gave them the impression they were lost. The alternate space established by the panoramic image gave the spectator the illusion that the world was ordered around him or her and thus it became a “medium of instruction” that adopted an empowering, bourgeois view of the world.

Transplanted to a rural setting, the panorama surveys a landscape of which society has also lost sight. This displacement is not the result of positive gains in size and viability, but rather the residue of a stagnating economy and marginalized community left behind by modernization. The conventionally picturesque panorama and the balance, hierarchies, and absence of imperfection that characterize its form are disrupted by the disorder of rural decline. This contemporary scenario exploits the idea of the panoramic image as a tool for instruction by placing the performance in a privileged position. Under the weight of the entire composition, the lamentable action of the screen surrogate is transformed into an opportunity for recuperation as he struggles to regain agency within the contested landscape.