SITE, David James Miller

December, 2028

David James Miller’s SITE is a multi-disciplinary work of poetry and film-based photography, set in the massive postindustrial floodplain east of the Mississippi River and Saint Louis, MO—sometimes called the “American Bottom.” SITE is made up of continuously recursive serial reflections, disjunctive collage, and photographic documentation to look at presence and emplacement in this particular landscape, while also suggesting one's embeddedness within America's wider historical, political, and environmental narratives. Past and present combine into a blurred reflection of ecological, political, personal, and even numinous experience. The poems and photos suggest the development of memory and perception, repeating and unfolding across time, in change and in exchange. Slippages between proliferate and cascade. It's a work of inquiry into direct, lived experience: Where are we? What were we left? How do we proceed? These questions are implicit to SITE and to contemporary experience alike—one that often converges with and diverges from narratives competing for our attention, as they proliferate and cascade across the screens that light up our faces at night.  As C.S. Giscombe writes in Prairie Style: “Always the first question is Where?”  And as Augustine has observed in his Confessions: “There is no place, both backward do we go and forward, and there is no place.”