Artist Feature

Every week an artist is featured whose single image was published by Der Greif. The Feature shows the image in the original context of the series.

It’s easy to lose sight of exactly who you are while passing through the Black Garden. At the start, things are clear, there is you and there is the land, you each have your names and the division is simple. Yet even from a peak within Nagorno-Karabakh you are lost in the panorama. Mountain after mountain begets valley upon valley. A singular road runs through it all and though the end is too far to make out, you trust there is an end. In your immediate vicinity at any given time you lose yourself in the intimacy of the trees, the overgrown foliage, the tombstones of an abandoned graveyard like fossilized crevices disintegrating in the wind. Voices buried beneath the moss, and cumulative silence, whisper about war. There are small signs of life, a singular bird, a crucifix like a question mark that would cease to be seen if not for a blinking flame between the dripping walls of a crumbling cave. As night falls, shadows cannot be deciphered from leaves. Something floats by your eye, mouches volontes, a schism in the visual fabric, produced by your mind or the air, it doesn’t matter. Your heavy heart beats out what color is left of the fading day and at once you are included and excluded from the landscape. -Amy Pagnotta