top of page

Red Springs Project 2020-25

An ongoing site study on place and memory, through colonial images of indigenous and settler ancestors at the beginning of the twentieth century: Paintings photomontage prints, and a photo book, drawn from a 1906 album shot at the Mission school, Stockbridge Munsee Band of Mohicans in northeastern Wisconsin: on the sense of place, home, erasure, education, religion, ghosts, more-than-human visitations, and survivance. 1906 becomes the stuff of shadows and light, illuminating and obscuring native and settler dynamics in at a mission school, at Red Springs, Wisconsin. The Band had just hired my grandfather to teach kids on and off the reservation, kids who appear multi-racial in the photos, and anywhere in age from three to fifteen. Grandpa, fresh from teachers college, youngest son of immigrant farmers, was twenty years old. His album, filled with battered, small prints was left to me in 2020. Accidental reveals around co-existence, conflict, and mutual opacities intensify the mysteries of this collection and its potential for abstractions. 120 years ago, at the cusp of the rise of the residential schools experiment, this school was probably not residential at the time, but became so within a decade. Typical photo: log cabin school room, Christmastime interior, packed with kids, beneath a banner on the "young earth" timeline: "4000 BC - Christ is Born - 1906." Here are the temporal crosshairs between a creationist map and daily life on hard roads of survival, after nineteenth century forced removals from the Hudson Valley and western New York State. In 2020, I assembled the found photos into a photo book. "I wish we could know who the children are, know their names," Yvette Malone, librarian at the tribal Miller Library and Museum, told me when she accepted a hardcover copy for the collection. Her question propels my research. Who are these children? I must explore what I do not know, and I know that I do not know. Accepting this limit, I try to practice cultural humility in the face of our shared stories, my family's and the band's. Thus far the work is in painting, and (in future) chine colle intaglio. Abstract color forms stand in for temporalities, like storms swirling around the opacity of the past. ‘Shatter zone’ describes a dynamic canvas of adaptive change in the face of chaos. Children persist in the midst of the zone. They look at us from the shattered past. Confabulation enters the scene of making. Deer Lady meets Melusine. On a winter's night, place and time are in quantum transit. In and around the schoolhouse, the children keep watch. Indian school legacies, forced migration, erasure and fragments of truth-- all these histories take part in oblique ratios to one another. “The labor in interpretation fell on me...urgently implicated in the creations of looking that were established between us. By framing reconciliation as a way of seeing..." -- Naomi Angel, 2022.

Terremoto: Christina McPhee

An essay on the Red Springs project and related work, by Silvia Perea, curator, Art, Design and Architecture Museum, University of California- Santa Barbara, published in LUMart Magazine, winter 2024:  Link to PDF

Red Springs Album, self-published through Blurb, 2020,  link to e-pub

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Vimeo
bottom of page
https://www.artworkarchive.com/profile/christina-mcphee3000