Tales from a Ghost Town JOANNE ALBERDA

Tales from a Ghost Town

JOANNE ALBERDA

August 17 – September 29, 2018

COMMUNITY GALLERY

Virginia City is a ghost town—the skeleton of a booming Montana gold mining camp in the late 19th century. As a museum it is the record of one of hundreds of get-rich-quick dramas related to the search for gold in the American West. Some buildings in the city and in the area around it have been abandoned and qualify as “ghosts.” When I was a child my family visited Virginia City many times, a day long outing. Years later, returning to Montana to visit family, I revisited Virginia City with my camera in the fall of 2009, 2010, and 2011. By that time the tourists were gone, and the place did feel like a ghost town. The silence of this “dead” place gives the viewer time to examine the drama of decay. Empty rooms and broken doorways invite speculation about the lives of people long gone, but the decaying wood invited me to search out another story, the life of a living material that grew and developed, was cut and used by hands both skilled and unskilled, and finally left to dry and rot. Documenting the evidence of time through photography I was moved to capture some of these “tales” with hand dyed fabric, created by the ungoverned mixing of colors, which often resembles the growth patterns observed in cut and decaying wood. I have been creating these works over the past several years with various shades of the gray and rusty reds of decaying wood. Recently I visited an exhibition of works by Clifford Still, whose content and style reminded me very much of the decayed wood, but his use of bright colors encouraged me to expand my color choices.

In this exhibition I have included a few images of the town and area as it exists today, some digitally manipulated images of decaying wood, and textile works that were inspired and nourished by the images of wet and decaying wood.