Thursday, September 22, 2011

GRAND CANYON:

AfterImage Series

Entry 3

I had some responsibilities at the Canyon. It wasn't a scott-free deal, but it was a pretty sweet one. The AIR program gave me an astonishing place to live for 3 weeks. I was about as far from the sheer drop of the South Rim as a pitcher is from home plate. And I was on the second floor, with access to a rooftop deck (really just the flat rooftop of Verkamp's Visitors Center porch), so I could overlook the earth's innards. I loved it when tourists would pose in front of the Canyon, which meant they'd be facing Verkamp's, and muse to the wind, "How'd that woman get up there?"

In return for all this I provided the AIR program with 3 public services. I gave the 8th graders at the Grand Canyon School a creative writing lesson; I gave a talk on how petrographs came to be; and most memorably, I judged a children's art contest.

The class went pretty well. Halfway through I realized I'd forgotten to wear a bra in front of a group of 8th graders, and lost my concentration. To make up for it I became even more energetic than usual, until a girl sitting cross-legged at my feet asked me to stop waving my arms around. "Whenever you do that," she said, "the ashes fly up in the fireplace behind you and rain down on our heads."

Sure enough, the kids were covered in ash.

I gave the class the sentence, "I was making pancakes when the monster came, and..." The assignment was to complete it.

One kid said, "...cut eye, mouth, and nose holes out of the pancakes and wore them as a mask." But this was my favorite: "...said, "Hi honey, what's for breakfast?"

Judging the art show sounded like fun, but proved to be a real conscience-tickler. How do you choose between a kindergardener's masterwork and a high school student's pretty good assignment? Technique or inspiration? A young woman named Celina--my co-judge--and I nearly pulled out our hair.

Here's what I wrote about it for The Daily Telegraph...

Artist in residence: creating art in America's natural masterpiece

In the first report from her three-week asignment, Pamela Petro, artist in residence at the Grand Canyon, is tasked with judging the creative efforts of America's imaginative youth.

Creating art in America's natural masterpiece: blog one

Examples of the work created by Pamela Petro's young novices

By Pamela Petro

2:21PM GMT 04 Feb 2011

I woke this morning to coral-colored sunlight streaming across my bed and furious snow flurries framed in my window.

Canyon weather is like a kid’s drawing or a Cubist painting, an otherworld where no space/time combinations are impossible. Very cool, but it makes dressing difficult. The weather, as it happens, was a perfect template forthe day’s activities. One of my responsibilities as Artist in Residence is to do a series of community programmes, and today was my first.

I and a young woman named Celina, who’s about to embark on a career as an art teacher, formed a panel of two as jurors of this year’s Grand Canyon’s Kolb Studio Annual Student Art Show. It was our job to select first, second, and third place winners in four groups: 5-7 year-olds, 8-10 year-olds, 11- 13 year-olds, and 14-18 year-olds.

The theme this year was “Creating Traditions,” which, we discovered, can mean just about anything. To get the kids’ paints, pencils, markers, and crayons moving, organizers set a series of questions.What unique traditions do you or your family follow? What traditions do you have in common with others in your community? How do you create new traditions?

Based on the work we saw today, the American Southwest is in for some freaky new customs.

“Deers Kissing” is one. (Not “deer,” but “deers,” as the title insisted.) Another is sword-carrying snakes, pictured in a work called “Camping in the Woods.” There were also more, well, traditional traditions: kids drawing the Canyon, kids depicting the Canyon in collages, kids drawing animals, brothers, sisters, still-lives, friends, Native American iconography, and that perennial favourite, bugs.

At one point Celina remarked that many of the pieces must’ve been made at Christmas, since the kids filled their skies with massive, bright-rayed stars that looked like shorthand for the star. “Oh, no,” said Helen, one of the organizers. “That’s the way stars look to these children.”

That exchange, more than all the rock strata scribbled in yellow, red, and orange markers, reminded me I was judging a contest at the Grand Canyon and nowhere else. That’s how the stars look to me at night, too, from the crown of the sky all the way to the horizon. These children take nothing for granted.

Some of the titles were extraordinary. “Weather or Not” showed a storm over the Canyon—black clouds that looked like they needed a shave, heavily crayoned on neon-orange paper. “Night of the Silent River” and the cerebral “As You Go Within” were more about words than images. As was my very favourite title, “The Grand Canyon with 19, The Red Headed Condor.” We never figured out what that meant, but we liked it a lot.

Should someone ever ask you to judge a children’s art contest, don’t think, “Oh, how sweet! That’ll be fun.” You might as well reply, “Oh, forget the contest. I’ll just go straight out and crush children’s hopes and dreams underfoot, rather than critique their work. It’ll go faster that way.”

Celina and I agonized for three hours and looked at over 200 drawings, paintings, collages, and three-dimensional pieces. If Rene Westbrook, the Artist in Residency Coordinator for the South Rim, hadn’t brought us homemade Pad Thai for lunch, we’d still be there, too weak to make our selections.

We finally settled on “Painting of the Grand Canyon” by seven year-old Maria Hernandez as Best in Show, a vibrant, liquidy watercolor that looked to me like Chagall on a good day, with a new paint box. I hope this will create a new tradition for Maria: drawing what she so clearly loves.

Pamela Petro will be writing two further columns for Telegraph Travel, recounting her experiences as the Grand Canyon's artist-in-residence.

Here's Celina holding up Maria's winning work:

I heard later that some folks weren't too happy that a second grader had won, but Maria was happy.

Thanks to all the students at the Grand Canyon School whose work is featured in this post! And to all the students who submitted to the show. It was a delightful agony choosing amongst your work!

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Artist's Statement

Petrographs are silver gelatin images printed on stone. My name—Petro—means rock in Greek. What a stroke of luck….

When natives of northeastern Siberia saw a view camera for the first time they called it, “a three-legged device that draws a man’s shadow to stone.”

Petrographs do the same thing. By casting and briefly fixing our shadows to the bedrock, they juxtapose the “snapshot” span of our mortal memories with the vastness of geological time. And that puts humans’ experience on earth back into perspective. We are not the planet’s masters. We’re just one of many species passing through deep time.

I grew up with rocks in the house—my father was a mineral collector—but I don’t make petrographs for keeps. After harvesting rocks from rivers, seabeds, and quarries, I coat them in photographic emulsion, print them with images from the human sphere, and return them to their original locations. Then time, water, sunlight, and weather do their erosive work as I record the process with my camera. The results, revealing the rocks as they’re distorted, obscured, and weathered by ever-shifting environmental factors, evoke in days the passage of years, and tether us to natural cycles of decomposition and replenishment. The installations, which scientists assure me have no ill-effects on their host eco-systems, are fleeting. Our images disappear, and the rocks return to their own silent business.

There is a Welsh word—hiraeth—that has no cognate in English. It suggests something akin to the “presence of absence,” and refers to a deep, and creative, longing for something unattainable that exists only in the imagination, possibly beyond place or time. In the case of Wales, a subject state since the 13th century, it derives from a longing for a national history that should have been but never was: a gap filled by myths, legends, and once-and-future yearnings.

Petrographs exist in the gap between human consciousness and the world around us. As our images erode in the sea or a river or under the snow, or the sun weathers and cracks them, their weathering enacts the presence of absence before our eyes: the hiraeth of the natural cycle. They insist that our lives are snapshot moments, and that we belong to the earth—that it is our home.

Petrographs’ insistence on our place in the natural order is a sometimes beautiful, occasionally unnerving reminder of how place shapes us—the rocks’ histories, formed and distorted by glaciers, ancient seas, fire, and ice, become miniature landscapes that give mass and form to our memories—and how everything we do imprints, for better or worse, on the environment.