Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer

Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer is a two-channel synchronized video installation. A composite of the two channels presented side by side in one video is available from Video Data Bank for educational use only.

Fort Marion, also known as Castillo de San Marcos, has a long and complex history. Built in 1672 and located in St. Augustine, Florida, it served as a prison during the Seminole Wars in the 1830's, and a prison at the end of the Indian Wars in the late 1880's. It was where Captain Richard Pratt developed a plan of forced assimilation through education that spread across the United States to boarding schools, built with the philosophy "that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."

Each section of the video tells a small part of this history, from Seminole Chieftain Coacoochee's account of his escape from the fort, to ledger drawings made by the prisoners from the plains given pen and paper and told to draw what they see and what they remember. Each section traces the persistence of presence and memory experienced through confinement and incarceration, through small samplings of space and hope. Where the ocean is a beginning of a story that is incomplete, whose end is lingering on a surface that is innately unstable and effortlessly resolute.

Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer is available for educational use as a two-channel composite. Please contact VDB for exhibition requests.