sussman*spf10*research: Artist Entry: Phil Underdown 10.11.10

Phil Underdown

RELATION: Underdown's imagery really reminds me a lot of photographs I took last semester for my senior show. His attention to detail and focus on the ground level relates to my imagery and process.

WORK/QUOTES:

"The Trapper's Lament" During the course of the last year a large number of beavers established themselves along the small, crooked creek that winds along one side of my property in the Adirondack park in upstate New York. As they built more and more dams and eventually began felling trees adjacent to the house, threatening access to the fields as well as the house's septic system, a trapper was reluctantly called in. I am still wrestling with this decision, and decided to photograph what was left behind after the beavers were removed. These images of the aftermath of that decision depict a landscape where a variety of forces and impulses collide, photographs of a crime scene where I am both chronicler and perpetrator. Here is a landscape where our mythologies of nature and the realities of our daily lives combine in an uneasy confusion, an analogue to our relationship with the environment on a cultural as well as a personal level; I moved to the Adirondacks because of my love of nature and I try to live my life with respect and concern for the future of our planet. I recycle, I drive a Prius, I give money to environmental organizations... and I kill Beavers. This is the landscape of that confusion, the trapper's lament.

- Phil Underdown, "The Trapper's Lament" "Darius Himes Selects Phil Underdown for 1st Curator's Choice Award!." Hey Hot Shot! (2010): n. pag. Web. 11 Oct 2010. .

Grassland 2005-2009

In the 1940s, a wetland was filled and leveled to create an airstrip. An artificial grassland was born. Over time the original trees and plants of the wetland returned only to be cut back by mowers and grazing animals. In the 1990s, the abandoned airstrip became the Shawangunk Grasslands National Wildlife Refuge. Now the runways crumble as plants sprout through cracks in the tarmac, and the sun, rain, and snow take their toll. Mowers still cut the grass to hold back the succession to forestland. From the outside world, development, changing agricultural practices, and habitat loss slowly press on its borders.

Grassland exists in a hybrid state. Like an imitation of a natural landscape, it attempts to be something that it never was, and can’t be without constant intervention. In this mowed plain, the ultimate ordered terrain, we see a panorama of policy; of decisions made in faraway offices where flatness and straight lines flow from an engineer’s pen rather than from some natural process. Trees appear like plots on a map, isolated in Grassland’s vastness, only at the edges allowed to grow unchecked. One year this half gets mowed, the next year that half. A tractor fills the niche that would be occupied by brushfires. For the grasshoppers who make constant take offs and landings in the late summer, or the coyotes whose droppings remind us of their presence, the creator of these runways is irrelevant.

After four years of photographing in its 500 acre expanse, I am beginning to bring Grassland into focus. These images are a type of fiction; a story of a place told through the traces of its inhabitants—a tire mark here, a bird house or a puddle of broken glass there. Signs of its past, present, and future mark its rationalized topography like small-scale reenactments of the dramas playing out in the world around it. An archeology of the present, the images depict the landscape of this time--managed but wild, planned yet unpredictable, expressed not through traces that have left their mark for centuries or millenium, but through phenomena that are more fleeting and ephemeral, some playing out over a season or years, others lasting a mere afternoon.

Underdown, Phil. "Grassland." Phil Underdown Photography. Brooklyn Digital, n.d. Web. 11 Oct 2010. .