Excursionist: The Vatican / Muir Woods

This is my story. I am a visual artist who lived in New York City from 1993 - 2011. Last November I moved to my hometown of Milwaukee, Wisconin to provide care for my father who was suffering from Parkinson’s Disease. In the house where I grew up I set up an art studio and continued to work when my father’s condition went into an unforeseen, rapid decline. Consciously or not I selected video I shot ten years ago in the Papal Basilica of St. Peter as my subject, making still images of a city where I felt most concretely the magnitude of the human story and an unexpected reassurance of belonging to it. My father died in our house January 27th, 2012 one week after the image in this art work was captured. Several weeks after his funeral my mother and I traveled to San Francisco. During our visit we spent a morning touring Muir Woods National Monument with my sister, a location I chose specifically to photograph the Sequoia sempervirens or the California Redwood trees, among the oldest living things on the planet. Like a clock these images represent a clear marking of time before and after my father died while also depicting locations that consider disparate concepts of time. The intention of this work is to contemplate our individual place in the notion of eternity that these places suggest.

-Thomas Hellstrom, March 2012