Improvisations on digitized photographs from a 1906 album shot at a mission school, at Red Springs, on the Stockbridge Munsee Band of Mohicans reservation in northeastern Wisconsin:  

The Band hired my grandfather to teach at their school. Grandpa, fresh from teachers college, son of German immigrant farmers in Nebraska, was twenty years old. He arrived with a new camera. He left just over a year later.  His pocket sized album filled with tiny prints was left to me in 2020.
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Typical photo: log cabin school room, Christmastime interior, packed with kids, beneath a banner on the "young earth"  timeline: "4000 BC - Christ is Born - 1906." Here, in the temporal crosshairs between a creationist map and daily life on the hard road. Well before 1750, people had been forced to leave their aboriginal home, colonially known as the Hudson River valley. The European designation 'Hudson river' obscures its firstname, Mahicannituk, the river that flows both ways. 

First I assembled the found photos into a book, available here as an ePub. ​ "I wish we could know who the children are, know their names," Yvette Malone, librarian at the Miller Library and Museum, told me when she accepted a hardcover copy for the collection. Her observation gave me a prompt for painting.

‘Shatter zone’ describes a dynamic canvas of adaptive change in the face of chaos. Children persist in the midst of the zone. They look at us from the shattered past. Confabulation enters the scene of making. Deer Lady meets Melusine. On a winter's night, place and time are in quantum transit. In and around the schoolhouse, the children keep watch.

Indian school legacies, forced migration, erasure and fragments of truth-- all these elements take part. 

“The labor in interpretation fell on me...urgently implicated in the creations of looking that were established between us. By framing reconciliation as a way of seeing..." -- Naomi Angel