I’ll bet some of you out there might have wondered what’s happened to the old riverblog? Here it is near April’s end and there is nothing to show for what occurred during this month. Let me reassure you that the Artist at Exit 0 has been as active as the river has allowed him to be. Exploring the line between culture and nature is personally important. Between periodic high water, the exhibit at the Carnegie Center for Art and History, the Kentucky Derby Festival, and life in general…posting stories has needed to take a back seat. The process, however, is ongoing. I have been to the river on multiple occasions and observed the transition from winter to spring at the Falls of the Ohio. Making art remains a priority and I realize that I just feel better if I have the opportunity to make something of my own. Don’t be surprised if I end this month with a flurry of posts in an attempt to catch up. Let’s start at the beginning of April and see how far I get. Here’s a story featuring Mr. Mosquito Nose who had an experience with a young journalism student interested in what the Artist at Exit 0 does on an ordinary trip to the Falls.
This day began with a rendezvous at the river. I arrived early and was scouting out the situation. The Ohio River had just been up and I knew the riverbank was reconfigured with different driftwood and new junk waiting to be picked up. I had been contacted previously by Taylor Ferguson who is a journalism student at the nearby Indiana University Southeast in New Albany who requested to tag along with me on one of my Falls of the Ohio adventures. Taylor has a creative project of her own…to create a short, documentary video and she wanted the Artist at Exit 0 to be the subject. This was the first time anyone has requested this and so I agreed to do it. With a cool and sunny day before us we left the still leafless willows and walked out onto the riverbank.
Taylor turned out to be a super friendly and very interested in my projects. I will admit that it was odd being tethered to a microphone and I felt a little self-conscience talking to myself so openly with a video camera pointing in my direction. I usually have some dialogue running through my head as I explore this environment, but to hear it in such an audible fashion was different. I brought Taylor to my U.F.O. (Unidentified Floating Object) art site where I keep my river materials and demonstrated how I went about making an absurd figure from the poor stuff of the world. With Mr. Mosquito Nose in hand, the three of us left my outdoor studio and explored the environs near the railroad bridge. Along the way, Taylor would ask me questions about when and why I started this project. By now, those are familiar questions. I enjoy looking for what is interesting about each day. So, now it was time to walk the riverbank with Mr. Mosquito Nose and be present in this moment.
The lack of footprints in the sand told me that few others had recently passed this way. As we walked along, I kept an eye out for those little micro-contexts that I could pose this latest Styro-figure in. After making an object…I’m interested in using it to create an image. With luck, the images might then be used to tell a story. Here we have come across an old, frayed barge cable that the river washed into the park. It seemed a good location to take a few photos.
Near the cable, we came across the remains of a camp fire. Brick and rock define a shallow pit that still had some ashes in it. For a few years now, I have also photographed old camp fire sites with the intention of publishing them here as a collection. I’m always struck by the elemental nature of this activity and what its importance has meant for our species’ survival. We set up Mr. Mosquito Nose by the fire pit and now those photos are a part of this record.
Among the other objects we came across was this old sprayer. The figure’s arms are raised in warning because this might have potentially been used to spray herbicide or worse. Caution is required whenever you come across something that could possibly harm you. Knock on wood, I’ve been doing this project for more than a decade without any physical reactions or incidents from the stuff I’ve encountered out here. I place a lot of faith in the diluting power of millions of gallons of fresh water.
Moving on to another location, I collected a few glass and plastic bottles along the way and made this composition. Some of these containers have mystery contents of their own.
Later we came across this pet food bowl that was half full with water. The water in this bowl could have collected here as the river level dropped or been filled up by rainfall? It is another example of an incongruous object making an appearance at the Falls.
Taylor and I came across another barge cable that had been snagged by a low hanging willow branch and created this final photograph with Mr. Mosquito Nose. The day was moving along and both of us were needed elsewhere. About a week later, Taylor called me up to say that most of the audio the microphone picked up had interfering sounds of wind and water. This seemed perfect to me because that’s what I usually hear out here as well with the occasional bird call thrown in for good measure. Taylor had three hours of footage that needed to be edited down to three minutes which sounded like a daunting challenge in its own right without the audio difficulties. I later caught up with Taylor in Louisville and did a quick voice over recording that I hope will do the trick for her project. At the time of this writing…I haven’t seen the finished video, but hope it turns out for Taylor and that she gets a good grade for it. Okay, that’s it for now from the Falls of the Ohio State Park…one last image then I’m calling it a post.
Artist at Exit 0 Riverblog 