Salting the Earth, beginning 2006

This is an on going body of work that I develop in when visiting Covington, LA, the place of my birth. This work responds to the commercial development along Highway 21 that has accelerated since 2004. This is my back yard, the ecosystem that I explored as a boy. I enter the construction sites now as the trespasser. The actions I perform are the negative gestures of the development, developers and the suburban commercial complex in itself. On site I poetically illustrate the damage, marks, and erasure of the plots of land. My character of the Salt Man, is the local specter. I haunt these sites before the sunrise, spreading salt into the soil, an allusion to the act of impotence that the Romans enforce upon the fields of the Carthaginians. My audience are the construction workers who i leave evidence for, the motorist trapped in traffic, and the remaining pines on the fringe of the disturbed grounds.