River, Red
River, Red is a visual art and research project that observes the space created by natural river migration. The project explores concepts of time as made evident in land, the malleability of human imposed borders, and the contrasting temporalities that can be perceived in nature and those that are human constructs.
I recently visited the Red River and traversed the space between the current location of the river and the recorded location of the river as of 1923, when the southern bank was legally declared the border between Texas and Oklahoma. Since then, erosion and accretion have caused the river to move by upwards of one mile in certain areas. This differential has incited disputes over private property, state borders, and Indigenous Land. River, Red, seeks to visually quantify the space that we are unable to anticipate by documenting both the natural and human made landscapes that I encounter in that space.
River, Red addressed current issues regarding perception of land and the passage of time. Photography has the ability to compile images of multiple locations into one space, whether in the form of a book or exhibition. The work is a collection of views from land that we were unable to anticipate the existence of when imposing the construct of a border. This parallels the experience of living with a changing climate, land, ecosystems, and human interaction. Individual works in the series range from infrastructural remnants that point to where the river once was, the cumulative marks of human presence, and the oblique aerial views that capture different layers of plant growth and the solidification of new land. My hope is that viewers can experience the evidence of natural processes and see time on a scale larger than that of everyday experience.