LANDSCAPE

In an old brown photograph from the Civil War he notes pyramids of cannonballs piled in the foreground, in front of a stairway--actually an embankment--that leads up to a pocked field. The scene feels like an excavation. The earth is dark, the sky drained. The field, vacant, by a wood, is randomly scattered with shapes, which are dead bodies. The neatness of the piled cannonballs, the almost classical siting of the stairway, contrast starkly with the richness of the black soil, the superfluous shapes of the corpses. What was before ground of contention has become desecration, sinking beneath view, memorized into the riddled fabric of coincidence, of what was, in all its particularity. He is haunted by the irretrievability of this instant, instance, captured in such novel detail it appears to reveal more than it should, or rather promises to vouchsafe, or to discover, some clue that will lead in an unbroken line of descent to this moment of his existence, and so render a meaning, however oblique, to the act of his looking.












                                                                              Curtis Faville