SR20

The Visual Journal:

Online Assignment 2

for Art 656 R and D II

by Russell Maycumber

Spring 2015

“Survival is triumph enough”-Harry Crews

The impressions I have left here span a single outing I spent with my wife and son on a Sunday drive we took inland from St. Augustine Florida to the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings house in cross creek on the banks of Orange Lake. As a child I spent many summers on a lake two spring fed creeks over from the famous writers house but had never paid a visit. I have also spent many hours making that trek across the state of Florida but had never taken the opportunity to document the strange sense of place the journey evokes. I call it strange because after many years of moving around I have yet to encounter the same impressions as are left when moving through that country side. Statistically Alachua county is one of the poorest in the state. I think it is this factor that adds to its otherness. The abandoned businesses and lack of national corporate franchises and hand painted signs and out dated tourist attractions construct something strange. I have yet to pin it down. It is like a micro representation of “The American Dream”, in a sense. But ultimately this stretch of country is a real place regardless of what romantic notions become attached to it. What look like empty shells of pine sheltered sand and sun baked dwellings are peoples lives and homes. I like this way of seeing something. Homes aren’t built from stories of affluent victory. They are built from how we activate those spaces, for better or for worse. The video sequence starts with my shoes as I am the person who must walk in them, they take on the shape of my foot. I am defined by the air that I breath and the volume I displace, and the objects I collect or that collect me. The kitsch figurines, the well crafted ladder, the places we value for posterity or a construct of history or the places we leave behind that we thought would always be there. These dynamics intrigue me.