See the Elephant

2003-2010

This work was made in the margins of the American Bible Belt from my family home in the highlands of northeast Tennessee to the geodetic center of the continent in the Kansas heartland where my wife was born. I moved back and forth between these two regions in an attempt to clearly see and come to terms with the cultural landscape we grew up in. "Seeing the elephant" was an expression used during the Civil War by soldiers whose heroic ideals of warfare were destroyed by experiencing the carnage of actual battle. The phrase has since come to be used as shorthand for gaining knowledge through experience at the high cost of disillusionment. Disillusionment, however, can be recognized as a gift that gains one the possibility of seeing more clearly; even somewhere as complicated as the place you're from.