Arcadian Monuments: A photographic series © Anna Fariello
For four hundred miles through Virginia, the Blue Ridge is essentially a single long fin, only a mile or two wide, notched here and there with deep, V-shaped passes called gaps but otherwise holding generally steady at about 3,000 feet, with the broad green Valley of Virginia stretching off to the Allegheny Mountains to the west and lazy pastoral piedmont to the east. So here each time we hauled ourselves to a mountaintop and stepped onto a rocky overlook, instead of seeing nothing but endless tufted green mountains stretching to the horizon, we got airy views of a real, lived-in world: clustered hamlets, clumps of woodland, and winding highways, all made exquisitely picturesque by distance.
Bill Bryson. A Walk in the Woods
The exhibition Arcadian Monuments, organized and circulated by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Statewide Exhibitions program, was on view this spring at the History Museum and Historic Society of Western Virginia. The color images displayed in the galleries were intentionally romanticized images of the “real, lived-in world,” viewed by Bill Bryson from his hike along the Appalachian trail. The thirty photographs that made up the show were selected from a larger body of photographs that I began in the early 1990s as a silent protest in the face of a not-so-dignified end to a magnificent, antebellum homestead. I first saw it alone on a bare hillside, a two-story homeplace with columns and small portico. By the time I encountered that lonely mansion at the end of the twentieth century, no one had lived there for years. The building was beyond habitation, light piercing its empty interior.
"Rock Road" seemed a fitting address for the venerable structure, surely the bedrock of a long-faded community. The house stood apart from the ever-widening asphalt road before it. It stood in stark contrast to new homes springing up around it. It stood proudly as a stately reminder of another century. It stood simply as a monument to generations of lives lived and lost along the way. The Rock Road house continued to intrigue me until, one day, I decided to make its portrait. I spent an afternoon exploring its far corners with my camera. I recorded its dark interior, its faded exterior, and its sunny surroundings. During that afternoon, I imagined the many generations of children who played among the wildflowers and woods surrounding a small space claimed from Nature by their forebears.
After seeing the initial photos, I planned to return to shoot a couple of more rolls of film. At the time I could not have known that the fate of that Rock Road House would be the catalyst for what would amount to a decade-long photographic preoccupation. One day I happened to be driving along Rock Road and glanced to the place where the house stood. My plan of re-photographing it idly passed through my mind and I mentally calculated how long it had been since my first visit. My reverie was interrupted by not seeing the house immediately. I looked again and doubled back, believing I was at the wrong place in the road. But the fact was: the house was gone. Where once stood a two-story homeplace was nothing but a grassy field. The Rock Road House had completely vanished, without a trace of its presence in evidence anywhere. To me this seemed the cruelest fate, to be erased from history so completely, to be gone from all memory, for all eternity.
The photographic series Arcadia documents the cultural landscape at a single point in time. It is intended to capture the fading presence of a regional identity that is quickly being replaced by a national facade of fast-food franchises, suburban tract houses, and multinational businesses. Small creeks and roads meet this same fate and, as we develop the technologies to carve away at the steepest of our mountainsides, we enter a new era of destruction. As we turn the pages of our calendars, we will just as surely witness the continued destruction of our natural and built landscape as I had witnessed the destruction of the Rock Road homestead. As we make room for expanded interstates and “smart” roads, will we remember where we are or who we are? Rural heritage has been overlooked at a time when the culture of "other" has been celebrated, we overlook other-ness close to home. After the disappearance of the house on Rock Road, I became aware of the importance of these fading--and faded--surroundings, not for their actual worth, but for their metaphysical worth. I decided to record the presence of rural Appalachian architecture while there was still some left to record. Agrarian homesites are found in ever decreasing numbers. Once common and unique to the region, vernacular agrarian architecture--structures that create a visual sense of place--is eroding. Ironically, rural America is endangered.
Agrarian architecture grew from physical necessity. It is understated. Its design is an expression of function. Its stark exterior and lack of superfluous decoration is sometimes confused with poverty. But it is this very simplicity and lack of pretense that defines the beauty of this regional form. There is something wonderfully small about human-made structures built into the rural landscape. They blend into their environment and underscore the majesty of Nature by their smallness and their humility. They are the architectural opposite of skyscrapers which appear to dominate the landscape and proclaim an indestructibility. In contrast, rural homesteads allow us to feel the expanse and power of Nature, evoking feelings of awe and grandeur. Aesthetically, pioneer homesteads and the landscape they inhabit are one; they look as if they grew from the soil. They appear integral to the landscape, a wooded trunk supporting a canopy of tin. The oldest of these are reverting to Nature. No longer human-ized, they revert to the Wild. Their sole inhabitants are cows or bales of hay. They are abandoned, discarded, soon-to-be destroyed. They are worthless architecturally, worthless commercially, and worthless financially. They can neither contain anything of value, nor keep out the elements.
When the first Europeans arrived in the New World, there were perhaps 950 million acres of woodland in what would become the lower forty-eight states. The Chattahoochee forest...was part of an immense, unbroken canopy stretching from southern Alabama to Canada and beyond, and from the shores of the Atlantic to the distant grasslands of the Missouri River. Most of that forest is now gone...On a map of the United States [what is left] is an incidental smudge of green.
Bill Bryson. A Walk in the Woods
My version of Paradise exists in the rural landscape and sense of place found in the southern Appalachians. It appears to me a place with fluid geographic boundaries spilling from modern-day Virginia into neighboring states, meandering across ridges and dipping into dark hollows. Arcadia refers to an ancient land of milk and honey, a paradise lost. According to legend, peaceful peoples once lived free from strife and care, in perfect harmony with their environment and the animal community. Nature retained her character as Mother and benevolent friend. In those halcyon days, humanity was unobtrusive and in keeping with the elements. Traditional mythologies and religions are filled with such places called Eden, Atlantis, or Peaceable Kingdom. Did such places exist in the physical world? Can such a place exist today? For me, Arcadia exists in the present as it did in the past, as a place of the mind and spirit, rather than an actual place on the planet. It continues to exist today in childhood, in dreams and reverie, and in hopeful imaginings.
Through my photographs, I attempt to take the viewer on an imaginary journey through a pastoral and meditative space inhabited by understated monuments to the rural and natural world, remnants of an old world imposed upon the new. The images in Arcadian Monuments are intended to sharpen one's awareness to the experiential perception of seeing, a process I sometimes call “deep seeing.” It is important to recognize Arcadia in our own lives, whenever or wherever we may stumble into it. The sublime could be right next door and many of us would pass without notice.
While it is important to dream a grand future and mind-walk in the reverie of our past, our present is made more meaningful by threads of material culture which form the connective tissue of our humanity. During the latter half of the 19th century, the physical remains of culture were valued no matter how tattered or worn. These lost favor in the 20th, as the new century came to represent a clean break from the past. But before we ushered in the age of Modernism and a love for new-ness, Western culture revered the past as a window to understanding and self realization. Such a view was manifest in English gardens in which “ruins” were intentionally constructed to create a visual link to heritage and culture. In America, we picked up this thread in the construction of “garden” cemeteries, pastoral environments visited by harried urban citizenry in the Victorian era. In cemeteries such as these, one cans till come upon a “broken” column or “vine-covered” monument.
The built landscape is filled with stories; some are real, some imagined. Shelter came in the form of modest structures in Arcadia, like many throughout rural America today. In their time, each was the physical manifestation of someone's dream. When we are content, we pretend these rural homesteads were filled with happiness. When we are sad, we can pretend they were filled with melancholy. Small dwellings watch as mortals come and go, witness our birth, our growth, our flowering, our withering, our decay. Dwarfed by the majesty of the Appalachian mountains, modest structures stand patiently in contrast to busy inhabitants who scurry like ants through life. Theirs is a different sense of time, a time measured not in days and months, but in centuries and eons.
Gravity works around the clock to rearrange the original composition designed by some unknown craftsman. Slowly and relentlessly the elements invade their space. Time takes its toll. Nature reclaims what is left of their grandeur. Tendrils of fast-growing vegetation first spread along foundations, catching fast like little children's fingers at Mother's hem. Soon the tenacious vines enfold the clapboard sides, weaving in and out of windows, eventually laying claim to the roof. The roof no longer keeps out the rain, the floor meets the earth below, the walls lean this way and that. Overtaken by nature, vines intrude into its privacy, clawing at its faded domesticity. The floor no longer promises support, becoming precipitously dangerous, discouraging all but a few brave souls who dare to enter.
Dirt floors sprout new saplings which reach out to sunlight through broken windows. They are in ruin, yet live on, becoming more and more a part of the landscape with each passing day. The view from each window is transformed. It is magical to look up and see a piece of sky surrounded by a picture frame of rafters. In some, ways the transformation of these decaying, hapless buildings elevates them from the realm of the everyday to the realm of the sublime. Once stout structures are pulled downward into the waiting arms of Mother Earth, like the body of a loved one laid to rest in warm ground.
In late afternoon, when the sun is low and light cuts across the landscape, homesteads which dot the rural Appalachian countryside, are bathed in a warm, yellow glow. Like richly encrusted Byzantine icons, they are hallowed and halo-ed. They are the wizened, martyred saints of our communities. This is our Herculaneum, our Paradise, our Arcadia. Our mountainous landscape is itself weathered by time and elements that cycle round--spring rain, summer heat, autumn drought, winter freeze. But the hills are not the worse for wear. Tucked among them are a few remaining regional, vernacular homesteads, containing remnants of past lives. They are relics of our own near past. They are our archeology. We exit their doors as we leave this life, leaving behind the fruits of our labors and loves. What have we made? What do we leave behind as a mark of our passing through this place?
This exhibition is being circulated by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Contact Curatorial InSight for booking information.