Text and Image |

“Landscape Peopled with Figurines” & “Regarding the Question of Ownership”

Landscape Peopled with Figurines

 

— based on the artwork of Melanie Vote

 

 

Many have been employed

unearthing the remnants of culture,

wrestling artifacts and knick-knacks from their cribbing –

but our frames are too slight

for the collection of fears we carry. Especially

worrisome at the ravine’s edge, we stand and trade

rumors of those who have fallen.

 

The trail is fashioned of questions.

What is this place? How can I

determine the scale of things?

What warrants restoration? Why has this,

and not that, survived?

 

I tiptoe, transformed to a modern minotaur

rummaging in my rough way through ruins.

Barefoot and entranced, I have come to inhabit

the doll’s head, called by others the godhead,

entered by stringing together scraps

of natural refuse. You may say this is rustic.

 

Unable to discern the vile or holy events

that deposited these relics, we cling to hints,

traces of recalled dream, a canvas knapsack

we cannot open, a dress thrown to the ground,

and make use, and make lives among them.

History is inescapable that way.

None among us starts fresh.

 

Despite our excavations, the end of the story

is always just out of earshot, an abandoned campsite

with embers still hot under the stir-stick.

What we agree upon is this: the infant

at the fence line has never been easily pacified.

 

 

 

“Excavation” / oil on panel, 8″ x 12″

 

 

*     *     *     *     *

 

 

Regarding the Question of Ownership

 

— after Melanie Vote’s series “The Washhouse”

 

 

The rain on the tin roof of the washhouse runs off the backside,

hitting a slab from the maple that was taken down

by a professional crew earlier this year. The washhouse

had a thick cement floor until two little girls smashed it into pieces

with a sledgehammer and stacked the irregular chunks just outside the door.

The painter comes year after year and assembles her easel

to reproduce the details of this structure. She can’t paint fast enough

because each season further weathers the boards. Last year, entering

the wash house, there was a pile of fine dirt as tall as our knees.

It took a live trap to know for sure that this was the work of a groundhog.

We relocated it 6 miles away. If you look at the outside of the shed

you don’t know what is going on inside. If you look at the inside of the shed

you don’t know what is going on below it. If you look below it

you still don’t know the history of this land, the way this soil

didn’t even start out here but was carried in the skirt of the wind.

 

There is a kind of enlightenment to be found in staring at one thing,

and somehow by doing so maybe you can come to know about the baby

buried in the yard, or about the woman who camped alone by the fire ring

and heard voices all night. Maybe you can even come to know

about the osprey who hunts the pond using positioning to obscure

its own shadow-warning from the fish. The present just keeps

heaping itself onto the past, so many layers of wallpaper,

so many decades of flooring, carpet over linoleum over wood.

When we add our own part we write messages inside of the walls.

During the renovation, countless people asked why we didn’t just bulldoze

the place. Much like others asked, years earlier, why anybody

would sell good farmland to the state. The barn here is not suited

to modern equipment, but we haven’t torn it down, not even for the good money

people say they will pay for the ancient boards. I pay the taxes every year

on this property but I am still mystified how a person can own property.

 

There are philosophers who believe we only rightfully own what we produce,

that owning land is a form of theft. And Emerson declared the landscape

belongs to the person who looks at it. I don’t understand how it could be

that I can sell a walnut tree to a tree buyer. How can a person own a tree,

something time-rooted in this drifted soil? Consider how this tree

began here, long before I was born in the delivery room of a military hospital

in a far-away state. How this tree was already finding purchase

 

in the loess soil. The name on the title has changed three times since then.

Because it is my name on the paper at this point in history, I could sell

all of the trees; I could girdle or fell or burn the trees; I could bulldoze

these hills and this house and this barn. I could sell the dirt by the truckload.

 

For $1000 a year in property taxes I can trap the groundhogs, make a junkyard

out of the barn yard by stacking old cars and ruined tires and travel trailers

that have seen better days. I could farm it or I could charge someone money

so that they can farm it, because somehow in the twist of history

this became temporarily mine. But I can’t stop thinking about

what the painter’s dad said.  Everyone has to have some place to be.

So if you throw an imaginary grid over all of the land that exists,

and print plat maps that show who owns which piece,

and you bind those maps into books that are reprinted year after year,

what happens to the people whose names are not in that book?

 

 

 

from “The Washhouse” series, oil on paper on wood, 12″ x 16″ (2020)

Contributor
Kelly Madigan

Kelly Madigan has received an NEA fellowship in creative writing, and the Distinguished Artist Award in Literature from the Nebraska Arts Council. Her poetry collection, The Edge of Known Things, was published by SFASU press in 2013. Her work has appeared in 32 PoemsPrairie SchoonerTerrain.org, and Plant-Human Quarterly.

Contributor
Melanie Vote

Melanie Vote received her BFA from Iowa State University and her MFA in Painting from New York Academy of Art. Vote was a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2007 and has been awarded many residencies including The Vermont Studio Center, Jentel in Banner, WY, AHAD in Abu Dhabi, UAE, The Grand Canyon, Weir Farm in CT and at Cill Rialaig, Ireland. Her work has been exhibited nation-wide and internationally. In New York at Flowers Gallery, The Lodge Gallery, Sloan Fine Art and DFN Gallery. Additionally her work has been shown at the Indiana Contemporary Art Center, Jenkins-Johnson Gallery of CA, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, with solo exhibitions at Galleria Farina in Miami and Hionas Gallery of New York, The Hangaram Art Museum in Seoul, South Korea, and at ADAH, Abu Dhabi. “The Washhouse, Nothing Ever Happened Here” was at Equity Gallery in 2020 and most recently her work was on view in a two person exhibition Concurrence at DFN Projects in October 2023. See more at melanievote.com

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