Harrison Haynes
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Cases resulting in death were known and soldiers were sometimes successfully treated by being discharged and sent home. Receiving a diagnosis was, however, generally regarded as an insult.
-From the the Wikipedia entry on Nostalgia
The environs of my upbringing and narrative fragments from that period have at times figured largely in the subject matter of my work. In these recent photographs and collages, I am instead focusing on the tendency to reframe the past so that the activity of trying to recapture or reprocess our own personal histories, and/or the collapse of those efforts, becomes the subject matter. But within all this self-reflexive tense-shifting there is still an indissoluble attachment to something hovering in time, an anachronism. I have been haunted lately by the news that Xe Services LLC, formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide, the notorious private military contractor, is headquartered not only in my home state, but in a primordial and endangered wetlands known as The Great Dismal Swamp. The pastoral romanticization of the Southeastern landscape suddenly wrenched into the ugly fluorescent light of inhuman pragmatism and economics.
Backwater
We’re Sailing At the Edges of Time
Backwater
We’re Drifting At the Waterline
Oh We’re Floating in the Coastal Waters
You and Me and the Porter’s Daughters
Ooh What to Do Not a Sausage to Do
And the Shorter of the Porter’s Daughters
Dips Her Hand in the Deadly Waters
Ooh What to Do in a Tiny Canoe
-‘Backwater’, Brian Eno
I like the idea of time travel because it seems like it would involve a lot of passive observation. It’s the chance to be present at events you never got the chance to witness, but might know something about. It’s similar to the allure of invisibility but more dangerous. You have to be careful not to touch anything or make any impact at all. You might kill yourself or prevent an entire family tree from happening down the road. The closest thing we have to time-travel is recorded music. And within the physics of analog recording, a really fascinating event can occur in which moments within the song itself can travel back in time. The most well known example is the vocal ‘pre-echo’ in Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’.
Harrison Haynes is an artist/musician based in North Carolina and is currently an MFA candidate at Bard College.