Mark Vitaris: Borderlands

The book is a photographic discourse on the country that straddles the forty-ninth parallel from the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains to the grasslands of Saskatchewan and to the western Dakotas. It depicts the land metaphorically as a river of time with tributaries of history and disparate cultures flowing in discontinuous moments of consciousness. It is a portrayal of a land where you can feel the wind blow the dust of ages, a place of melancholic beauty, an oasis of solitudes. As a component of a larger project, it draws upon an awareness of the histories enacted on the land leading me on a course of artistic and personal exploration toward the intersection of pasts and the present.

Many years ago the natural flow of goods and ideas on the northern Great Plains was oriented north and south. With the creation of the 49th parallel, the international boundary effectively cut off this natural flow. Borderlands Project explores the historical ramifications of the border and more generally, the concept of borders from an artist’s point of view. As an immigrant, I understand liminal states, of being not one nor the other until conscious choices are made.