Pleasant Hill
1990 – 1992

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Project Concept

In the 1940s and 50s, S. Hallock duPont purchased several small adjacent farms in northern Delaware and consolidated them into a private game reserve. This land, surrounded by suburban sprawl (see below), is now part of a more extensive state park. While some sections are still farmed, most of the property is being allowed to return to its natural state.

History

1944 - 1962
Childhood home (Rd #3, Newark Delaware – later called 1175 Pleasant Hill Road)

1990
Began photographing with 4x5 and 8x10 field cameras

1992
Exhibited Pleasant Hill as a selection of 24 x 30 inch silver gelatin prints at Janet Borden Gallery with catalogue (essay by Robert Sobieszek, see below).

1993
Produced a small group of enlarged 16 x 20 inch platinum prints (printed by Martin Axon).

Technical

Cameras
4x5 Wista and 8x10 Phillips field cameras

Lenses
10 ¾, and 12 inch Goerz Dagor

Film
Kodak Tri-X

Developers
D76 and HC110

Prints
AGFA Brovria

Pleasant Hill Catalogue Essay

By Robert Sobieszek

RAY MORTENSON: A Garden at the Center

“You must travel at random, like the first Mayans,” said the imagined demiurge Tezcatlipoca to the American artist Robert Smithson, “you risk getting lost in the thickets, but that is the only way to make art.” Like many of his contemporaries, Ray Mortenson has been losing himself in the thickets of our late twentieth-century environment, pursuing lucid images that might convey certain relevancies to himself and to us and returning from those vague terrains with photographs of haunting and sometimes dangerous beauty.

Mortenson’s is an art of peripheral scenics; his subjects are found at the edges and in the fringes or thickets far from the centers of quotidian life. His “Meadowlands” series of 1979 to 1984 is an extended portrayal of the bleak, barren wastelands in and around New Jersey’s largest industrial zone. His large-scaled “South Bronx” series of a few years later explores the ravaged and abandoned interiors of tenement apartments. His latest series, “Pleasant Hill”, delves into the melancholic landscape of the nearly forgotten (except by developers) baronial game preserve of S. Hallock du Pont, outside of Newark, Delaware — more pastoral, perhaps, than the earlier subjects but still a remote site poised between past and memory on the one hand and probable future transformation on the other. More personal as well; Mortenson grew up there as a child, his family owning a few non-du Pont acres in the center of this preserve.

It was Joseph Addison (of Tattler and Spectator fame) who argued at the beginning of the eighteenth century that each estate should be turned into a “kind of garden.” By the end of that century Uvedale Price’s Essay on the Picturesque and Humphry Repton’s Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening firmly established the aesthetic category of the “picturesque” in the pictorial arts and linked it to the notion of the irregular and character-ridden garden landscape. Nearly two centuries later Ray Mortenson has revisited the original source of the picturesque, has found it to be not as Edenic or pastoral as it once was (at least in theory), and has returned with selected evidence of a strangely restive and marginalized nature on the perimeters of culture.

Nineteenth-century painters and photographers could comfortably and honestly work within the picturesque tradition, portraying bucolic landscapes, scenic vistas with ruined abbeys or castles, or stately oaks in meadows. For Mortenson in the late twentieth century, the bucolic is a panorama of industrially despoiled wetlands, his ruins are devastated apartments in urban slums, and his treed meadows are poignantly surrounded by a labyrinth of overgrown and untended forest. In fact, the forest’s thicket he loses himself in (as he literally did as a child playing in it) is so claustrophobically overgrown by wild grape or Virginia creeper that it seems at times impenetrable. Still, practically devoid of any signs of contemporary culture, the former garden retains much of its remote grace although images of it cannot but presume the unspoken threat of suburban development looming beyond the scrim of tangled vines.

Much to the point of Mortenson’s pictures is the sort of garden described in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” — an allegorical garden that is at once a chaotic novel, an enormous riddle, or a parable whose theme is time. In it, multiple pasts collide with multiple possible futures; a network of times fork, break off, and embrace all possibilities of time. Mortenson’s garden, therefore, could be the pristine nature of the far-distant past, the well-managed picturesque garden or preserve established by the du Pont family, the mysterious playground of the youngster who was to become the artist, and the arrested corner of an ambivalent land’ scape surrounded by suburbia and stripmalls - all these at the same time, a kind of ur-landscape suggesting all the others.

Speaking in Wim Wenders’s film Tokyo-Ga, Werner Herzog said, “There are few images left. Everything is cluttered. No images can be found. One has to dig for them. One has to search through this violated landscape to find something. I see only a few people who take risks in order to change this misery of having no images. We need images that are relevant and adequate, ones that correspond to those inside ourselves.” Ray Mortenson’s garden photographs seem appropriately relevant and more than adequate. He has discovered a special terrain located somewhere between personal memories and the inevitable entropy of the outside world; a terrain filled with sun-drenched meadows, wooded corners, faintly discernible paths, mysteriously entrapped forms, soundless copses and dense walls of vegetation resolutely admitting nothing from the outside to intrude.

In one of Mortenson’s photographs, risking a cliché, a shaft of light shines through some trees and bathes a field of grass. In some ways, it is a graphic metaphor for the site that Martin Heidegger defined as the “origin of the work of art”: “In the midst of beings as a whole, there is an open place. There is a clearing, a lighting ....This open center, therefore, is not surrounded by what is; rather, the lighting middle itself encircles all that is, like the nothing we hardly know.” Despite the fact that we have forgotten what it is to know nature, despite the loss of Eden and the “Death of Nature”, despite the fact that vines are overtaking the trees and that pathways are obscured, despite the labyrinthine thicket that abounds – despite all this, the stately sycamore still stands in the meadow suggesting that the fringes might truly be the center.

© ROBERT A. SOBIESZEK, LOS ANGELES, 1992

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