Drove A Stake, Facing West, single channel video, 4:34, 2008
Both physical test and metaphorical exercise, Drove a Stake, Facing West, serves as a metaphor for the western frontier of the 19th century and the entitled mentality of “manifest destiny.” Seated in my studio, facing west, I blow up a balloon to test its expansive capabilities. I repeatedly expand the balloon; displacing air from my body, pushing it farther westward with each series of exhales until both my body and the balloon give out. The phrase, “drove a stake,” was appropriated from the text of a historical marker for the “The Point of Beginning.” “The Point of Beginning” is a historical site on the northern bank of the Ohio River on the Ohio/Pennsylvania border from which the survey of nearly all the land west of the original thirteen colonies was begun in 1785.