large landscapes, small signs

Drive in near Clayton, New Mexico. 1996Rural isolation is at the heart of Rosalie Gascoigne's work in yesterday's post.  Yes, rural communities are lively and busy, but these are islands of intensity in a much wider landscape that receives little human attention except for the extraction of resources or the harvesting of crops.  Small details such as highway signs, fenceposts, billboards, here a drive-in, there a barn from an earlier farming era, small towns – such things are left in place where they eventually fall down, bit by bit. 

According to the biographical material available on Gascoigne, from the beginning her work was made from salvaged iron and steel, wire, wooden boxes, construction debris: the detritus of rural occupation.  This is not the rubbish from aboriginal occupation which is in an entirely different realm, but rather the cast-offs of the struggle for settlers and farmers to bring an order to a huge landscape project. 

In the background of the old drive-in screen with its field of speaker posts is the armature of a centre-pivot irrigation system.  Its days are probably numbered as well.


Comments

[paul]

Not sure that rurality is that connected to the land or the visceral. The small rural town I grew up in is larely gone. Many of the houses are still there, but the actual town is gutted. The main street no longer has a grocery store or a hardware store; they are out on the highway. Instead there are a ragtag range of boutique stores trying to connect with a tiny tourist trade or whatever alternate culture can survive. Most of the people seem ok with it all.

[stephanie]

When you drive through southern Saskatchewan, one expects to see all the small towns that sat around the grain elevators: this is an iconic Canadian prairie image, however, the elevators are gone and with them the towns. Agribusiness consolidated family farms into huge territories, and as farming is a precarious vocation, rural depopulation has been pretty extensive.
Had we been in the States, the small towns would still be standing, as they are in Texas for example. An old, tilting, false-front street, many of the buildings roofless, the honky tonk bar usually the only building still open: it's all like some stage set for a nostalgic western.
In Saskatchewan the towns are completely gone, and where they were is a field. Once in a while there might be a sign saying that there was a town there once, and sometimes the graveyards are still there, but rarely. These places vanished completely.
And, it's all been quite recent. My maps are about 30 years old, from when Saskatchewan was still quite busy, dozens and dozens of small towns that I remember quite clearly as I would stop for lunch, or camp nearby, or get gas. Not now. And there certainly isn't anything on the highway. You practically have to drive to Swift Current, or Moose Jaw, or Regina before you see any services.