2024 Portfolio of Dustin Dennis
I hold the chainsaw while you adjust your glove. Hands that are beat, weathered with calloused grooves. The ash from a cigarette extends, falls and spreads across a shirt. A story, a joke, and then another story. The earth is marred and punctured at the place of impact. Our limbs contort, our muscles strain and ache. I have a fleeting recognition of someone moving in the distance, then spot a plastic bag tied and shredded in barbed wire. My mind extrapolates. I can no longer distinguish you from your environment.
As a teenager I would often cut and haul wood for the winter with my family. This obligatory-ritual combined physical exertion, the controlled violence of machines, humorous chatter and quiet interludes between the deafening roar of motors. In moments of exhaustion or when conversation lagged my imagination would wander in and out of lucid states allowing my mind to move between reality and fiction.
A witness tree serves as a reference point in land surveying when no other visual markers can be employed. This identifiable monument is visually situated to act as a stand-in for a true point in difficult to mark landscapes such as a lake, river, bog or cliff face.