Prairie Profiles is a body of work that examines the unique identity of the American Prairie through the lens of phenomenological categories such as part, whole, presence, and absence.
Prairies have been and continue to be among the most paradoxical of landscapes, considered to contain both nothing and everything, the repository of culture’s rejected past and its cherished ideals—a provincial backwater and sacred heartland. It is a landscape that receives its identity from the ideas and aspirations of its inhabitants (and other Americans) as much as from its own characteristics and, as a result, is a place of competing representations.
—from Recovering The Prairie
—from Recovering The Prairie
Today the identity of the American Prairie is poised between an inherited poetic imagination and ongoing scientific preservation and conservation. Prairie Profiles examines this unique relationship through the lens of phenomenological categories such as part, whole, presence, and absence. Each work represents a specific aspect of the prairie. As a body of work, they trace a circumference at whose center is the prairie’s essence.