Portfolio

    IDLE FRONTIER is a collection of large-format alternative photographic prints by Bradley Verhelle.  The project explores historical, contemporary, and personal accounts of the land on which the Seneca Army Depot once stood in a story that stretches from before the 1940s to the present and beyond.  The ‘frontier’ is the edge between the known and unknown, a place so ripe for discovery that we associate the word with exploitation of resources and of people.  Unlike most frontiers, this land has already been exploited, squandered, and tainted.  Despite the site’s repeated history of dispossession, the Seneca Army Depot has regressed back into the realm of the unknown and the undiscovered.  The ‘unknown’ of the Depot is degenerative, as if the site has been re-shrouded in mystery.

 Obelus to Ruination is an exhibition of photographic work outlining and exploring the process of reaping memories from birthplaces, hometowns, and other places of origin.  Centered around the Cayuga Lake Salt Mine of Lansing, New York, the deepest salt mine in North America, the project situates the slow-fading of the built environment—like the slow rusting of a bridge—with the looming threat of a mine collapse, which would dramatically alter local environments and public memory.

 

Through the hazy lens of alternative printing processes, "home" becomes an amalgamation of the lived and the liminal.  The roadside trail, the rusted bridge, the desecrated barn; all of these become the show's namesake obelisks, monuments to ruins past and ruin to come.  The work curates a collective memory among those engaging with the work and encourages us to hold these spaces close — whether or not we know them.