PTB Labor
Omnia Vincit
A hundred-year-old floor, creaking underfoot and scented with black pepper, runs toward a night light that echoes a photograph in Pine Tree Ballads. At the end of the wall, the plaster bat from the bedroom where I stayed. The walls are painted the color of that bedroom.
Along the hall, in gold frames, archival photographs of my family at work on the land through the years.
Turning around: 3,400 pounds of salt, a tarp, Mylar, a woodpile, rope, and an axe in a chopping block engraved Labor Omnia Vincit. A mystical workplace.
Inside a shed, a video played in the dark. MARA, from the installation, is online.
Labor omnia vincit: work conquers all. The phrase, adapted from Virgil’s Georgics, a poem about working the land, was carved in wood above a door in our family’s house in Maine. The summers there were never vacations. They were work, handed from one generation to the next.
My parents worked hard too, but as a child of the 1970s I was given room to wander. I played and dreamed in the woods, listened to my grandfather’s stories of the land and of the people who had once lived on it, and searched the old photo albums for their faces. Archive, fact and imagination grew together. It is where I first understood who I was in a place, and where the story I keep telling, truth and fiction held in one telling, began.
The installation turned the Pine Tree Ballads archive into a place to walk through. A creaking, hundred-year-old floor scented with black pepper led down a hall, painted the color of the bedroom where I stayed, toward a night light and a plaster bat. Along the walls, archival photographs of my family working the land hung in gold frames. Turning around, you met a room of salt, a tarp, Mylar and a woodpile, an axe set in its block, and a shed where a video played in the dark.
I wanted the kind of experience a cathedral gives, where light and space prepare you to meet the myth. The archive became a mystical workplace: generational labor, the rawness of the land, history and the imaginary, met with the whole body rather than as a sequence of pictures.
