Vernal, Finished
The two dinosaurs used to stand opposite one another, as sentinels, welcoming visitors to Vernal. The very fact that one was feminine and one masculine made it easy for me to believe that they were the embodiment of my grandparents. Helen was Dinah, a pink apatosaurus and George was a T Rex, together they had come to symbolize Dinosaur Land. It was underneath the watchful eyes of these dinosaurs that I grew up. In my mind the dinosaurs were immortals, the icons of my religion. They seemed to age with a different clock, but still they weren’t free from time’s passing. Over the years T Rex had become a martyr, filled with arrows like St. Sebastian, while Dinah stood quietly, a witness against the executioners, from her post in front of her vacant motel.
One year ago I traveled back to Vernal to document the changes that had transpired over the last 10 years. I had a hypothesis that Vernal’s recent economic boom, caused by increased oil production in and around the area, would be the proverbial straw set to break the camels back. I saw the recent development as a personal attack against my history, against my eden of sagebrush and sandstone. I was going to stop it, I was going to preserve my past. I struggled with how to do this, that is until I realized that Vernal, the city I was so protective of, had really only existed in my mind, the result of my fondness for the past.
Through a series of simple projects I began to create a modest fossil record of my Vernal. In this record there are stories of my childhood, stories of Vernal’s rich folklore, and a visual glossary of Vernal as a place, person, and Idea. Upon completing one of the larger projects I realized I had subconsciously reunited the two dinosaurs. Their reunion comes in the form of two old photographs, from my mother’s photo album, placed together into a spread. Here, on the page of one of my projects Vernal exists again as it once did, a testament to the power of the communicative quality of images, of narrative.