Zack Bent
For the past 5 years, I have been making regular trips to a parcel of land south of Cle Elum, Washington that was scorched by fire in the summer of 2014. I was enamored with the mysterious and meditative quality of the darkened and transformed landscape and employed it as a stage set for photographing sculptural and environmental interventions. At the center of these pictures are my 3 sons who activate the vast setting through collaboration, play and myth-making. The photographs are process-driven images responding to the desolation of the forest while acknowledging the impending growth just beneath the surface of the land. Including my young sons as players in the photographs is my way of comparing the land to our fragile flesh and interjecting quiet acts of human presence amidst the ruinous spires.
In Memoria, as a title, depicts the act of creating memorials or reliquary like photographs in partnership with my sons. In the passage to and from this public land, the unsettling relationship between domestication and wilderness has becomes blurred so that works created on and off-site seem to fixate on unraveling loss, fear and transience. What has emerged in this project are alignments between the experience of time and the depiction of its passage both in the land's shift from death to rebirth and also in the subtle change in my sons as they morph from childhood to adolescence.