For my final semester of my MFA at the Vermont College of Fine Arts I set out to find a balance between the personal and the political. I intended to explore my father's farm in rural Northern Kentucky as a way to question how corporate farming models were destroying the family farm in America. What I discovered as I began my inquisition was a much more complicated relationship between the farmer, environment, and local and national business interests. I also discovered that many of the artifacts I investigated were triggering memories that I had long forgotten. It has become a complicated inquiry into the way that memory and perspective can shape our politics, and the role that the land, the very earth itself, plays in a complex relationship between a gravel pit, my father and me.



Saturday, May 1, 2010

Expansion

This video is a composite of three aerial maps of my father's farm. The first two from 1987 and 1994 are put together from photos on file at the Farm Services Administration in Hebron, KY. The final image is captured from the current image on Google Maps. The animation shows the spread of the gravel pit as the housing boom led to increased digging. In the image in 1987, nearly 80% of the pictured land is my father's farm.



Posted by Roderick Vesper at 7:49 PM

3 comments:

  1. dimaMay 1, 2010 at 9:31 PM

    the white areas are the gravel pit expanding. right?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Roderick VesperMay 2, 2010 at 8:38 AM

    Correct. I am considering "colorizing" the images and redoing the animation so that it is a little easier to see where the expansion is occurring.

    ReplyDelete
  3. dimaMay 2, 2010 at 10:18 PM

    I think "colorizing" strategy will definitely work. sounds like it's worth a quick sketch, so we can look and discuss.

    ReplyDelete

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