BARN BURN

Last August, at the end of my 23rd summer on Prince Edward Island, I made the difficult decision to burn down a barn on my property that I could no longer afford to maintain. I had asked my friend Faye, a historian and museum curator, for advice, hoping she would urge me to preserve it despite the expense. When I looked at the barn, I saw years of memories, especially of my late husband and the family we had raised together. But Faye leveled with me: “Stop being such a sentimentalist. It’s an eyesore and the raccoons nesting in there are creating havoc for the farmers. Burn it.” So I made arrangements with the New London fire department for a controlled burn. Unable to bear the thought of watching, I scheduled the burn for when I would be back in New York City.

But instead, the burning of the barn followed me, demanding I bear witness to it in an unexpected format: facebook. My neighbors, dairy farmers Debbie Cruickshank and Jamie Bernard, posted a video of the burning to my facebook page, and from there we began a series of email communications. I also began corresponding with Jamie’s sister, Shawna Bernard, who now lives in Ontario. The burning barn became a catalyst for thinking about everything from memories of those we had lost like my husband and their father, to dealing with the dramatic uncertainty of climate change and its impact on small farmers like Debbie and Jamie.

Inspired to examine what I had first hoped not to see, I began a series of collages using enlarged frames from the video and text from our facebook messages. By incorporating a judicious use of color and pattern, and by scratching, folding, and manipulating the photos, I created flat images within the visual grid of the computer screen frame that still retained a tactile sense.

As an artist who came of age in the seventies, inspired by video art pioneers like Douglas Davis, my work is rooted in the conceptual photos of that era. But what fascinates me most is the power of this current moment, the way our relationships to media via the internet have become so intensely personal and have so changed our understanding of memory and both emotional and physical geography. With just a click, I was able to connect with my neighbors in real time and watch from more than two decades of living down the road from each other. Through the sharing of the facebook video, my own grief and sadness became communal and was altered, enlarged, added to, dissected. The burning barn and its journey to my computer screen forces the question of memory, of what should be held or let go of, and how (or if) this burning can be controlled.