Yes, I’m back in school, teaching and learning remotely during my second semester in the University of Minnesota’s MFA program. Here's a look at some of the recent work I've been making.
This installation has three overhead projectors; on one wall is projected a photograph of a cave and a brushfire. On the opposite wall, the third overhead projector illuminates a moving 25 foot long transparency scroll containing photographs I've taken, images from my family's archives, and photographs from the Hennepin County Library's collection. The scroll follows a loose narrative, sequencing images of young boys playing with dollhouses, dollhouse interiors displayed at the Minnesota State Fair, demonstrations of various crimes by the Minneapolis Police for public education, caves along the Mississippi river, interiors of immigrant settlement houses, and men with hidden faces. The scroll is turned at the viewer's own pace, as a self-guided tour in which any number of illuminated montages and sequences can be made. The scroll ends with images from the demolition of Minneapolis' Gateway District, when this now-vanished neighborhood in downtown Minneapolis was bulldozed as part of a plan to displace the many unattached men who lived in Washington avenue’s many single room occupancy hotels. The “redevelopment” ultimately destroyed nearly 40% of downtown Minneapolis.
At the back of the room, I've installed a backlit dollhouse with transparent photographs installed in the windows, which have had their dollhouse glass replaced with fresnel lenses. Fresnel lenses are typically used for magnifying light in large-format view cameras and lighthouses. However, the magnification only works at specific angles - turn your head or pull your eyes too far back, and the backlit image disappears.
The images in the windows are photographs of men's bedrooms in the old Washington Ave hotels, taken right before the Gateway's redevelopment in the 1960’s. The city government had a variety of photographers document the properties of the neighborhood to help create the political will to demolish the unsanitary buildings. In the photographs of bedrooms, the personal effects of the anonymous men who lived there are arranged like still lifes, with pin-up calendars, dirty socks, and empty bottles scattered around.
Some of the men who lived in the Gateway had never married, but many had families that they had left behind. Some of these men ended up in the Gateway because it was in the biggest railroad town between Spokane and Chicago. Others hadn't come from far at all - I read a story of a man who had abandoned his own family in south Minneapolis, then spent the rest of his life drinking in a hotel room by the river, only a few miles away.
This project is partly based on the story of my great-grandfather, Joseph Nerburn, who vanished from the family's North Minneapolis boarding house in 1930. His wife, Eva Brown Nerburn, died mysteriously that same year. Their 6 children grew up as orphans, living at different orphanages across the Twin Cities. The oldest child, Lloyd, eventually became my paternal grandfather (my dad's dad). Joseph's disappearance, and possible involvement in the death of his wife Eva, are enduring mysteries in my family.