Corpus Battaglia

Corpus Battaglia mixes public and private histories of the American North and South: the mausoleum-still offerings of the Gettysburg, Antietam, and Valley Forge battlefields, and the iconic assembly of my own “four fathers,” in the four previous husbands of my mother. In one photograph, my father, Ivo, stands in front of a locomotive, wearing an imposing Shriner fez. In some photos, objects stand in as substitutes for the father figure. As substitutes, these objects include records of personal memories, or in some cases actual relics. For example, "Founding Four Fathers (Sam)" is a still life of the photograph of my mother’s second husband's burial urn, documented on a mantle after his recent suicide. In Corpus Battaglia my search for the father becomes phantasmal, haunted and haunting, as I traverse the surfaces of fabled American battlefields, commemorative Civil War statues, and the real life mementos of family patriarchs.