Lauderdale
(2019)
Located between a golf course, country club, major highway, and busy street that defines the northern edge of Saint Paul, Lauderdale is a neighborhood isolated from through traffic. My photographs are focused on the natural and artificial borders that serve to both confine and define the neighborhood. Within the surrounding geography of this place, my work aims to investigate the physical structures that shape and divide Lauderdale’s interior space as well as its boundaries.
I moved to Lauderdale five months ago and the first thing I noticed was how isolating it can feel to live here despite its close proximity to the city. These photographs are a direct response to this feeling. I would walk around and through this neighborhood every day, observing, exploring and understanding this new place with my camera. Through the process of making these photographs I have noticed the endless bordering and divisions of space and land that are occurring. Trees acting as property lines, fences hiding the home it contains, shrubs marking the point public becomes private property—my images focus on the banal and vernacular factors that divide, shape, personalize, confirm, limit, and obscure this area.
From this, further questions arise about how barriers and geography define a place within its larger context and the roll we play in shaping our landscape. This work is a steppingstone to further projects that will focus outwardly on these factors in a moment in time that is hyper political as it relates to borders, land and ownership.