Dason
Pettit

Built on Ashes

Growing up in the Mississippi Delta, I have been exposed to pesticides, religious zealotry, psychotic violence, guns, drugs and more. And yet, my memories of the place are full of happiness, if not stability. This dichotomy about the region was the catalyst for my project Built on Ashes. I wanted to visit the past through the present, to make images of people and places and events that I still dream about. Exploring the expansion of the small college town of Oxford, Mississippi gave me access to parts of myself that I had thought long faded away. William Faulkner once famously remarked, "the past is never dead. It's not even past". It can be no coincidence that Faulkner lived and wrote in Oxford.

Like a fever dream, my past haunts me in the small hours of the night still. Images of my grandfather and his constant revisions to our country home or his beat up cars are never far from my mind when I photograph. We lived just outside of town in a pecan orchard and this made it difficult for other children to visit. I spent so much time transforming the mundane into the fantastic that it is now a part of my methodology as an artist. What else do we see when we look at what we think we know? I find echoes of my perspective from long ago in what I see now. Cooks on smoke breaks remind me of my mother and her friends smoking in the back room of the department store where she worked. Trails of water in the fields describe my time as a teen defying the riptides of the Mighty Mississippi. The more I look, the more I remember. The past is not past…

For the longest time, I refused to acknowledge my roots, preferring instead to rebel against them, to rage at tradition. Perhaps it was why I had forgotten so much about my youth; I was fighting against the tide. When I turned my lens on Oxford and started to photograph, I found myself pulled toward the hidden places, the damaged things. And like my grandfather, someone was always trying to fix what was broken. There is still much I struggle to reconcile in my mind about the place where I have lived most of my life. I still struggle and try to swim upstream. But every time I really take the time to look, I find more pieces of myself floating to the surface. I now realize that this place is a mirror and what I see is me.