What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
Issue link: http://www.epageflip.net/i/1450212
FEBRUARY 13-19, 2022 WHAT'S UP! 9 Arkansas, I was emotionally stirred by our shared history here at the terminus of the Trail of Tears. It is not often discussed that Northwest Arkansas was not just a place of passing, but of active participation in native removal. Both Bentonville and Benton County are locations named after Sen. Thomas Hart Benton (1782-1858) who was an architect of westward expansion. The historical mindset regarding land rights called "Manifest Destiny," a wayward notion of ownership superiority, is attributable to Benton. Sadly the city of Van Buren likewise takes its name from the 8th President Martin Van Buren, who directed Indian Removal in the late 1830s. While it is impossible to place a present-day lens on 19th century events, by any context the terms erasure and genocide aptly describe the forceable take-over of native lands and resulting attack on native culture. With synchronicity in mind, I'm also fascinated that a detachment of Cherokee was moving past the location of my current residence in Rogers during March of 1839, while just two months earlier the Daguerreotype process was being described to the Academy of Sciences in Paris. There is obviously no causal relationship between the events, yet as a photographer, the intersection is unmistakable. Q. How did you find and connect with subjects to photograph for "The Wheel"? A. Covid created difficulty in connection, even with masking and vaccinations, yet the transparency of message found recognition within historical groups and native individuals. Participants from the Cherokee National Historical Society and the Oklahoma Historical Society in particular helped give access. Many people helped me locate subjects, and one led to another. Representation of subjects is extremely important to me. I never asked or suggested how someone should be photographed, as their depiction belongs to them. When working with people, my goal is to try and capture current thinking and self-actualization, the … will of native people to evolve and protect culture, language, and way of living. Places of historical importance may provide a window and reference to indigenous culture, and I was drawn to several locations, including the Hildebrand Mill and the site where the J.R. Williams Union steamboat was captured. I also photographed brick columns erected as a monument to male and female seminaries in Tahlequah, and I photographed extensively at Hunter's Home in Park Hill, the only remaining pre-Civil War plantation home in Oklahoma. Sometimes I would obscure a symbol of western expansion with an element of nature; perhaps this is a form of reverse erasure. At other times I would focus on a specific element, for example a horse apple collected from a historical place — from the grounds of the Choctaw Capital in Tuskahoma. Overall, there are more places than portraits in the exhibit. Q. How did you get interested in historic methods of photography? And why did this project call for use of several of those methods? A. Historically, the wet plate or tintype process is contemporary to the post-removal period. I also worked a lot in 8x10 and 4x5 sheets of film, and in the dry plate process, which is a photosensitive gelatin poured onto the surface of glass. At Hunter's Home I used a dry plate process to help depict the working conditions of one of the most important native photographers, Jennie Ross Cobb, using the same type of 100-year-old, antique camera she did. Jennie bought her dry plates and camera from a Sears and Roebuck catalog, so it made sense to me to try and re-create her process of imaging. Q. How do images like tintypes inform the viewer in a different way? A. For most people, tintypes are just so much novelty, yet for me they are a time capsule or teleporter to historic subjects. Our cellphones are remarkable cameras, and presentation on social media may be the most accessible exhibition platform of all time, yet it's also so transitory. I hope there will be images from "The Wheel" that have greater permanence and fuel memory — even understanding. A line of a poem to be read twice. "I consider this project ongoing," photographer Chuck Davis says of "The Wheel." "I've contacted a few other gallery locations to show the entire exhibit [after its run at FSRAM], and entered pieces of the work into future juried exhibitions. A sample from this work in progress was recently shown at the Walton Art Center, during its first-ever regional visual arts exhibition, 'Our Art, Our Region, Our Time,' which launched the center's 30th anniversary season." "Sometimes I would obscure a symbol of western expansion with an element of nature; perhaps this is a form of reverse erasure," Davis says. (Courtesy Images/ Chuck Davis) "Roland Pinault: First Nation" (left) is among works on show at FSRAM. Woodrow Proctor, a Keetoowah elder, (right) allowed himself to be photographed by Davis.