Catskill Boundary Lines: Outside Looking In

Conceptual Photographic Installation

2010

 

The Catskill Park is defined visually on maps as a large green area that spans four counties and 700,000 acres.  This “Blue Line” boundary is somewhat misleading, as only 41% of the land within this boundary is actually public land that is protected as “forever wild” as part of the NY State Forest Preserve.  The protected forest land within the larger boundary of the park is a disconnected patchwork of many smaller areas of land, some as small as just a few acres surrounded by roads and other obvious evidence of civilization.  These wilderness areas are designated on most maps as irregular and somewhat arbitrary geometric green shapes, but occasionally their artificial boundary lines correspond to actual physical lines in the landscape, such as roads, railroad rails, power lines and even mown lines in the grass.

 

The project Catskill Boundary Lines: Outside Looking In explores this intersection between the real and the conceptual by photographing certain sections of the park where the political boundaries denoted on maps correspond directly to actual physical lines in the landscape that can be seen when facing in towards the park, and are also visible from satellite images.  Each site was photographed along a familiar section of Route 28 in Mt. Tremper that I drive by regularly.  Like many local residents, I have a hard time defining where the park begins and ends.  This photographic mapping project explores our ambivalent attitude about the difference between the “park” and “non-park” tracts of land, and the actual lines created by our industrialized civilization that both contain the wilderness and separate us from it.

Composite installation views from the installation exhibited at the Greene County Council on the Arts show “Wish You Were Here” in 2010:

Left Panel:

Right Panel: