MFA|EDA 2016 Thesis Exhibition: Love Valley

Michaela O'Brien: Love Valley
Love Valley, a western North Carolina settlement established in 1954, is examined through an assemblage of contemporary and archival moving images, photographs, texts, and objects. Built upon it's deceased founder's boyhood dream of a cowboy haven, current residents must shape and reshape the township to keep their founder's utopian aspiration alive. Reenactment forms an important aspect of social life in this .2 square mile community where nostalgic projection must contend with limits produced by realities on the ground. In Love Valley men, women, children and animals each tussle for a place somewhere between an idealized past and an elusive future.