REBECCA REEVE

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"Marjory’s World is a series which I began during my AIRIE residency in the Everglades in December 2012 and then continued in Utah in 2013 and 2015. It draws inspiration from a ritual described in The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. In Holland, in the 1600s, during the wake of the deceased, it was customary to cover all the mirrors, landscape paintings and portraits in the home with cloths. It was believed this would make it easier for the soul to leave the body and subdue any temptations for it to stay in this world on its final journey.

 The ritual seemed, by extension, to be a confirmation of the deeply moving experience that one often feels in the natural environment, and thus provided me a literal and contextual frame within which to shoot and “reconfigure” the landscape.  In contrast to the wet conditions of the Everglades in Marjory’s World I, I chose the extremity of the Salt Flats in Utah for the series Marjory’s World II.

 The curtains in the photographs, all purchased from Goodwill and Salvation Army stores in south Florida and Utah, represent a ‘social fabric’ with a history already attached to them. In our increasingly urban existence that ever distances us from the wilderness experience, the drapes serve as visual connectors to the familiar. "