Dolan Geiman

Where I grew up, weatherworn billboards advertising Charolais bulls and Sunkist cola dotted the horizon. Surrounded by the fields and forests of the mid-Atlantic, every moment was an exploration, full of images that would be stamped permanently on my soul and carried as fodder for my later creations. During the week we would bail hay, cut grass, catch fish, dig for potatoes, fix fences, chase rabbits, trim the pine trees, and spread manure. Some Saturdays would be trash day, a day in which we would comb our property for pieces of rotting fence posts, sun-bleached aluminum siding, or tractor tires, all intertwined with honeysuckle and wearing wigs of field grass. All materials that we could re-use were saved and thrown into a pile near the barn; semi-rusted bolts were gleaned from piles of half-ruined wood doors, the doors themselves stacked for fire wood. On Sundays we went to the Church of the Brethren and sat on cushionless rows of pine pews, praying for the service to end so we could go downstairs and eat a lunch of fried chicken and potato salad. Seeing a black snake dart out from under the front porch; watching a wren grab a strand of horse hair from the fence and flit back to her nest in the firebush Š—– all of these images slowly surface from a memory bank that tends toward overflowing.Today, as an artist living in a city far from the familiar flora and fauna of my youth, I am attempting to recapture those moments and turn them into something tangible. In my studio, amidst boxes of Fur, Fish, and Game magazines from the 1940s and burlap bags filled with found objects, I try to recreate small stories and sketches of these fleeting moments. My mediums are ever changing, ranging from drawing and screen print to collage and 3-D assemblage. This, however, is only in response to the challenge that lies in making the most of my role as visual translator and interpreter of these youthful experiences from my Southern birth.