The Borderland Boys: Lithuania 2004-2005

Over the course of two summers I lived and photographed in Lithuania, mostly following a small set of streams, offshoots from the Neres River. In pursuit of these waterways I entered communally inhabited borderlands neither public nor private. In them rituals of solitude and camaraderie flourished amidst a haphazard, shifting wilderness, which drew me all the more by it's conflating contrasts. Clean water flowed just as waste was unashamedly tossed toward the meadow. Plastic surgery recuperation facilities cropped up between narrow, reaching young forests, and girls with masks were left unbothered. Cars decayed silently in the foliage while elderly grandmothers slipped bravely into cool blue lakes.

Even at the periphery of a highway, hospital, or waste-dump, to go barely into the forest was to enter another world gracefully, as if the previous had hardly existed. As much of Eastern Europe's forest is darkly weighted with brutal, traumatic history, events of shame and struggle, assassination and battle, it astonished me that these terrains have, by the recent generation's casual inhabitation within them, so swiftly been re-envisioned as spaces of pleasure, community and refuge.

The Borderland Boys project is an inquiry and celebration of these curiously synchronous, fragile and humorously shifting contemporary Lithuanian borderlands. I'd like to explore such liminal realms before they are named, maintained or made monuments of, before their potential and likely inevitable disappearance under the flora.

The landscapes I am drawn to have little to do with pristine nature or the environmentalist's concerns. Instead, my work is inspired by our rituals and residues of kinship and estrangement within the contemporary landscapes we inhabit. Suburban wildernesses and their related bushy back lots remain provocative terrains to me, drawn as I am to collapsing boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the public and private, between places and their dwellers. I'd like these photographs to celebrate those who still find inventive ways to connect themselves with what's left of nature at the edge of the suburbs, at the border of the wild that we've dreamed of.

THE FOREST LIST:

The Primeval Forest

The Sustaining Forest

The Animistic Forest

The Farthest Forest

The Fatherland Forest

The Monumental Forest

The Batttleground Forest

The Burial Forest

The Memorial Forest

The Sanctioned Forest

The Dwindling Forest

The Fountainhead Forest

The Pleasure Forest

The Recreational Forest

The Hunted Forest

The Sanctioned Forest (Transport), C-Print, 30" x 30", 2005