Norris Dam becomes a landscape where sempiternity corresponds to the temporal. Although the landscape is ever-changing, the imprint of the dam lasts in the cosmos, the memories, and the senses. What becomes of one’s memory sorted by frames and flashes of sensory experience and impressions? A realm where reality dissolves into imagination but then returns to the realm of reality through the uncertainty and obscurity by the limitations of the frame. When one begins to spill out and resists the confined dimensions, the reality exists beyond the stretching arms of the world into the sacred and emotional. The landscape evokes the vivid images scattering my mind of wheat fields in Kansas. I always remember the wheat-the roughness between my toes, the smell of grain engulfing my nose, the blazing sun kissing my skin. Wheat sways in silence as muffled water rushes down below, a noise always tries to fill the empty. A fiery sky comprised of pigments of orange, yellow, pink, purple reflect onto the landscape creating a visual symphony of calm chaos.

It wasn’t until I attended Symphony in the Flint Hills where at sunset beautiful music blends into the burning hills of decayed, defeated wheat that I understood. Squinting provoked a blurred, endless ocean of sensory overload-temperature, sound, smell, sight, tactile experiences translated into childhood memories that become vivid realities when awoken. Fractured and restitched to form a semi-cohesive image. Territorial parallax deconstructs the nature of wheat or grid-like structure provoked by wheat to investigate how one’s visual perception of what appears to be a grid translates into a psychological response of comfort and nostalgia. A parallax is the effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions. Wheat acts in the same way based on one’s location and closeness to the scene [the pockets of the grid are noticeable from the outside but within the fields there is a lurking chaotic environment]. The project argues the categorizing of the dam beyond an infrastructure, an architecture, a landscape, a territory, a site, etc. and that the dam can blur every condition.