About Aferro > Emma Wilcox > Emma Wilcox Statement

Emma Wilcox
Forensic Landscapes

1)
In forensics, the absence of something can signify its presence. As reported in the Times, the chemical stain left by a body’s amino acids will suppress plant growth for up to two years, allowing a kind of shadow to remain after the thing casting it is gone.

 On maps, the edge of a place vanishes and reappears.  So do tracks, roads and the original names of things.   There are no indications as to actual habitation, climate, degree of violence or calm, or even whether the area is land or water.

But the land is marked heavy. It is dense chemically, visually, textually. This density of markings includes human bodies, geological timekeeping, stories told in bars, news archives, and EPA documents.

 I make photographs at or near night, on foot, and within a 5-mile radius of Newark.
 I make photographs of things that can always be found, and are always about to vanish.  

But not easily.  And not just yet.


2)
The intersection of highways, rivers and tracks defines parts of town that are invisible on the grid of light pollution.  A section may be hot on other grids when depicted statistically, but when seen from a train, it exists only as what is between other places.  

Across the water that won’t freeze, the shapes of the highways float, bright as flames, blinking like a sequence of zeros and ones.  The road goes underwater with the tides.  Under the highway, men catch crabs, filling the trunks of sagging black town cars.  

The river is burning.  What is it then?

Freeman Avenue is a dead end in both directions.  Everything began here: the light bulb, the phonograph, celluloid collars that caught shirt and wearer on fire.  Of all the materials used as filament for the light bulb, many burned; some too hot, some too slow.  Towards the end of his life the inventor began trying to grow enormous fruits, and produced a 15 lb strawberry.  The houses on Freeman that bear his name overlook the wide field, the slow river and Jimmy Hoffa.  
 
The sign is old red neon.  At night it reads, “Rust Company.”  The ‘T” goes on occasionally.

The blind man goes out for bread and milk a little while before dusk nearly every day.  His house is on Covert Street, but to get to it he must go past the tracks and under the highway.

So he walks the way back to his house on a path under the black, dripping highway.  Slits of light come down onto a pile of car radios.  The last freight goes through.

He always tells me, “ you know, its dark under there honey.”