Overburden centers on Mountaintop Removal mining in West Virginia. The work is a full and split-screen video installation comprised of footage of active and abandoned mines juxtaposed with video portraits of activists, local residents, and miners. The video images reflect the conflicting realities of life in West Virginia: the lushness of the landscape and the desolation of the mines. The work is documentary in style but contains no commentary or interviews. My goal with this work is to create a durational work of open narrative that presents no single agenda other than exposing the complex issues surrounding energy production in the United States.

All politics in this country right now are so polarized that it has become difficult to treat each issue at hand as specific to a specific place and time and affecting specific people. Without these specifics, it is impossible to feel the permanence in our decisions. In Overburden I would like to create a space where the viewer can simply look at and take in the human and natural elements of this one issue. Through extended video portraits viewers can reflect on the people and through landscape portraits viewers are given the natural, eternal environment around them. This is not a case where some people are evil and others are good, but where everyone has specific influences informing them, specific concerns of their own, and specific ways of being a citizen in today’s world.