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| Denis Keogh, CDC Participating Artist "Strange Harvest Fukushima Mon Amour" |
“COMMUNITIES, DISASTER AND CHANGE”
IN CORDOVA
The exhibit
Communities Disaster and Change came to Cordova recently and is installed in
our museum and library. It is a striking
collection of images and objects by artists from around Alaska who have been
asked to visually contemplate experiences that can be difficult to sit with,
let alone give expression to. The
responses naturally vary widely, from artist to artist and individual history
with the theme. Anyone who has spent any
length of time at all in Alaska has experienced a place constantly undergoing
dramatic change, whether it’s in the brief transition of the seasons, the
ongoing friction of unlike cultures struggling to adapt to one another, the
upheaval of the seemingly fickle forces of nature, or our own fumbling in using
and protecting this place.
I have a
threefold perspective with this show; as a participating artist, as Curator of
Collections and Exhibits at the Cordova Historical Museum, and as one with a
strong attachment to Prince William Sound at the time of the Exxon Valdez oil
spill. Like everyone who was here in
Cordova in 1989, whose lives were interrupted and turned upside down, violated
by the events of the spill, I feel like the best part about it is that it is
now layered with twenty five years of other memories. Time has healed many, but not all, of the
wounds of that experience. The Sound
appears to be mostly recovered even though oil is just inches below the surface
on many beaches. The salmon are here,
but there is still no herring fishery. Other
populations suffered unknown degradation.
It was simply not possible to be here during the spill and not be
traumatized by it to some degree.
With my
contribution to the show I attempted to make an evocative image of a sudden,
traumatic and violent event, an event that, being waterborne, has effects far
beyond the immediate place of its occurrence.
Fluorescent clouds on the horizon, possibly radioactive blossom up and
out, while an exploding, mutated organism bursts open as it is harvested from
the sea. Nothing too subtle, but still
an image I hope warrants a closer look and leaves room for interpretation by
the viewer. Allusions to various
tragedies, all self-imposed on us by us, are made in the title, “Strange Harvest
Fukushima Mon Amour”.
Denis Keogh
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