Just Beyond the River

by Amy Godine | October 2018

The past flows through the work of Daesha Devón Harris

The artist Daesha Devón Harris doesn’t wait around for inspiration. She looks for it; she brings it home. She takes it from memories of family picnics at Moreau Lake and Fish Creek near Saratoga Springs, where she grew up. From black folktales, slave narratives, poems of the Harlem Renaissance, and the story of Timbucto, an antebellum black settlement in North Elba she discovered in an exhibition at the John Brown farm. These influences inform her sense of mission as lushly as springs refresh a stream, and you can see them pulsing in her art as well, especially in her recent solo exhibition, Just Beyond the River: A Folktale, in the Courthouse Gallery at the Lake George Arts Project.

It’s not what Harris knows, however, but what she doesn’t know that seems to bring the most delight. Harris’s attraction to stories of loss and disruption from black America is more than keen, it’s compelled. In the Lake George show, for instance, several ethereally tinted photo-dyed silk hangings feature young people in water, moving, running, turning fast. Who are they? We see bodies and bare feet stamping up white clouds of sand, but no heads, no faces. They’re cropped out. The subject here is energy and action, but it’s all in hiding, undercover. Water is a refuge. Are they escaping? Are they fugitives? The thought is no great stretch in the context of this show; the 16-some mixed-media portraits on the gallery walls show black Americans no more than one or two generations out of slavery. And like the running figures on the banners, they are youthful (mostly), and unnamed.

Harris, an eager scavenger, finds vintage photographs—cabinet portraits, cartes de visites and the like—in flea markets and antique shops or given to her as whole collections. The people in these pictures share a resolute composure; they face the camera calmly, and meet our gaze head-on. Why not? Paying for a studio portrait was an act of proud assertion. It said, I am worth knowing; I count, too. And in the absence of names or information, those steady gazes challenge us as well. Know us, they say. Imagine us. We were once as real as you.

Harris’s process begins with the initial act of reclamation (repurposing discarded “junk” as worthy of redemption) and continues with the enlargement of each image and its conversion into a transparency. Then comes this 30-something artist’s real work, the pilgrimage and baptism…. There are sweet spots in the Adirondacks Harris loves. A stretch along the Ausable River, a wetland near Caroga Lake, a Keene pond. Places where she can wade into wild water and work with it, count on it not to dislodge her tripod, to keep its clarity and calm. Her camera’s on that tripod, staring right down at the surface. Harris presses her transparency under water until it’s resting on the riverbed; skewers hold it in place. She’s got green stuff with her she has harvested from the water’s edge—pickerelweed, a spray of berries, maple leaves, odd twigs. All this goes in the water, too, right on the transparency. She moves a wide leaf here, a black-eyed Susan there, garlanding the sunken image with scavengings until the image underwater is garbed in Adirondack verdure.

Now the camera is poised to capture not one but three layers of information: the image itself and all the river stuff around it, but also the dance of light and bubbles on the water’s surface, and whatever mucky stuff is on the riverbed itself.

The final image will be blown up big, and the 21-by-31-inch Chromira print will pick up every petal, vein of leaf, and weedy tendril around the figure, gazing out, a frame within the hardwood frame. Color throbs, and a hint of depth (for the surface of the water with its bubbles and play of light is part of this new image, too). But the artist isn’t done. Inside each frame is room for one small artifact, maybe a spyglass, tiny shoe, string of beads, oar lock, scrap of lace. And etched into the glass over the photograph is a line of verse by a Harlem Renaissance poet. What links them all? The image, bits of green and gold and red, homely artifact, scrap of verse whose author is unnamed? It’s up to the viewer to fashion an independent narrative for these “reliquaries.” The effort to construct a story out of a smattering of clues references black America’s much harder work of salvaging a coherent family history out of the wreckage of enslavement.

And seek for story lines we do; these prompts, however modest, are too beguiling to resist. It’s funny, too. Photographs of long-gone unnamed people staring out at us from under water ought to feel, well, a bit macabre. Yet it doesn’t. This water doesn’t drown. It revives. It washes the bright hues of Adirondack leaves and summer berries into the stern, staring figures and warms them up, so what might be creepy is now hopeful, and images of antiquarian interest take on an aura of enchantment. Wild nature has an un–easy name in black folklore. Swamps are haunted by malevolent spirits and the dreadful memory of bloodhounds. High branches of Southern trees once swung with lethal ropes. But Daesha Devón Harris’s Adirondack water replenishes. In her salving hands, the unnamed destination “just beyond the river” promises new life.

Harris’s show at the Lake George Arts Project closed in April, but several images from this series may be seen in Upon the Ground, Below the Water, a group show at the Albany International Airport Gallery, through September 3.

See more of Harris’s work at www.daeshadevonharris.com.

As the sun was setting on October 2, 1912, a half-frozen George A. Gray successfully landed his Burgess-Wright Model B biplane in a level field of grain stubble about 100 feet from a small house and a large barn. It was the first suitable landing place he saw after descending through the clouds and fog that had obscured everything below. He had no idea where he was. He had been lost, he was exceedingly cold and his plane had a fuel leak. It had not been a true emergency, but it had been close.

Upon landing, he was quickly surrounded by the property owner—referred to as Farmer Martin in contemporary newspaper accounts—and three or four of his children, all excited to see a flying machine unexpectedly descend from the clouds. Gray switched off the gasoline to save what he had left (and to avoid the possibility of a fire) and apologized profusely for the fright he had given them. Martin said he was glad that Gray had landed safely, and that it was a thrill to have an airship at his farm. He invited Gray into his house to warm up.

Bark Eaters

On April 27, 1905, a four-man “Army of Liberation” departed from Old Forge for the Fourth Lake of the Fulton Chain, two zinc-lined crates stowed aboard their rowboats. After a day of rowing, the men ditched their vessels and hiked 12 miles down a snowbound trail—“over hills, through swamps, and across rivers,” wrote Harry Radford, the quartet’s leader. The party lugged the ungainly boxes in shifts, switching handlers every 10 minutes to ease the burden, and spent the night at a cabin owned by a hermit named Frank Gray. The next morning, the group toted their crates to a nearby stream to release their cargo: a pair of beavers. A year later, Gray spotted a lodge of mud and sticks in the same spot. The beavers had settled down.

Four centuries ago, a beaver colony in the Adirondacks wouldn’t have warranted a second thought. Once, wrote Radford, “every river, brook, and rill… [was] thickly peopled with these industrious and prolific animals.” But the fur trade—so influential that Albany was once known as Beverwyck—spelled doom for the aquatic hordes. By the 1670s, 80,000 pelts were flowing down the Hudson River annually, bound for Europe for felting into fashionable hats. When the state finally banned trapping in 1895, fewer than 10 beavers remained in New York.

The beaver’s story, however, wasn’t over yet. In 1904, the state devoted $500 to beaver reintroduction and bought seven live animals from Canada’s display at the Louisiana Purchase centennial in St. Louis. The acquisition, like the Louisiana Purchase itself, proved a spectacular bargain: the imports, along with other relocatees, flourished and bred. Scarcely a decade later, the Adirondacks hosted a stunning 15,000 beavers. These days up to 70,000 paddle-tailed builders swim the region, nearly as many as greeted Samuel de Champlain. And we’re just beginning to figure out how profoundly their return has restructured our forests.

Path Finders

It’s a luminous autumn day and Kyle Drake climbs a slope of Dial Mountain in the Dix Mountain Wilderness Area, threading through crimson-leafed witch hobble, navigating tangles of bronze ferns, fallen trees and tumbled rock. He wears a pair of blue gym shorts, a trim black beard and ball cap, and carries a backpack the size of a college-dorm refrigerator.

Every so often he pauses, shifting his shoulder straps and looking over the slope with a shepherd’s eye. “OK, gather ’round!” he calls to his hiking group. “Let’s have some water and look at the map and compass.” Kyle is 34, a veteran instructor with the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), headquartered in Lander, Wyoming, where he lives.

Four men and women scramble wearily toward him through dense brush, looking grateful for a break. “There’s no trail,” says Jess Stapleton, sounding a little baffled at finding herself in a place where there’s literally no trace of civilization, not even a footpath. “We’re walking this ridgeline, pushing trees out of the way.”

She’s 25, athletic, a fairly experienced hiker and camper from Knoxville, Tennessee. But this is different, bigger and wilder. She and her fellow NOLS students are on a nine-day trip into some of the rawest terrain in the eastern U.S., their only comforts the ones they carry on their backs. “You get pushed to the point of almost losing it,” says LeAnn Turner, from Berkeley, California. She’s 31, grew up in the suburbs and never had any interest in the outdoors until a few years ago.

“You’re standing in the midst of dense woods, looking in every direction, not knowing which way you should go or where the ground will fall out from under you,” she says.

While resting, the group takes in a quick lesson on backcountry navigation, with Kyle explaining the difference between true north (that’s the pole) and magnetic north (located near Ellesmere Island, in northern Canada). He holds out the map and points through the canopy of glittering maple and birch at a distant spur of Bear Den Mountain, showing how to take an accurate bearing.

“I was surprised by the Adirondacks, how steep it is out here,” he admits, drawing his finger over the map’s dense contour lines. “It looks like this last little bit could be a little bit heinous.”

His students groan as they start upward again, but there’s a method at work here. Kyle’s job is to make sure these travelers—many of them brand-new to the outdoors—make the journey safely. But it’s also his mission to let them do most of the navigation and hard work themselves, while helping them stay mindful of what they’re doing, taking in the rare experience of moving through deep wilderness.

“It can be mentally exhausting,” he says. “But there’s value in the experience of things that are hard and emotionally taxing.”

His students have come to the Adirondacks from all over the country, bending the curve of busy modern lives and spending thousands of dollars to find exactly this kind of experience. This is important: They haven’t signed up for a comfy camping trip or a quick, glampy sort of holiday. NOLS promises real wildness, deep remoteness and solitude. When they talk about their reasons for being here, it sounds more like a kind of pilgrimage, a yearning they’re still trying to understand.

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