Charlie's Barn-
This is a new multi-media project based in photography and video. The work will explore installation and projection in the gallery and the rural landscape as well as composite photographs printed on canvas and alternative surfaces. The project centers around a January storm in Indiana that demolished our barn (our property was formerly owned by the Day family), Charlie Day a trapper from Putnam county Indiana and contemporary issues of global warming. The site of Charlie’s barn will serve as a catalyst to explore the effects of global warming on a local level.
Charlie will function as something like an oracle in the story, regarding the future weather shifts in this region, and the barn as a barometer or warning sign, like frogs and pollution or the proverbial canary in a coal mine. The work will also convey the intensity of a storm and what it feels like to live through a severe meteorological event. My goal with this project will be to make the issues of global warming local. To bring it home to the residents of the Greencastle area by connecting it to their immediate surroundings and history. As with many of my previous projects, raising awareness through art will be a primary goal of the work. Historical photographs and emphemera of Charlie Day (housed at the Indiana Historical Soceity) and his family barn (destroyed in 2008), video and interviews of local community members, photographs and video of the local landscape and found footage of climate change will be montaged together to construct an experimental narrative to project into the remnants of the barn and gallery.