TRUTH.
PRINT DESIGN.
VISUAL STORYTELLING.
Growing up, my sister and I spent a handful of summers with my grandmother in Truth or Consequence, a small, unhappening town tucked away in South New Mexico. This 247cm-long accordion illustrates those long summers in a town where time feels slow and the infrastructure is in a perpetual state of disrepair. It also expresses the growth from feelings of resentment to tender appreciation.
During those summers, time felt as expansive as the desert. My grandmother would take us on drives around Elephant Bute Lake, or to the Burke's outlet store to pass some of the time during the peak hours of heat. The rest of the time, my sister and I would walk up and down the boarded up Main Street of town and through the neighborhoods that connect to my grandmother’s house. At the time, I carried around a camera with me most of the time and snapped pictures of the emptiness and abandonment. My middle school self deemed it appropriate to filter the photographs in black and white with harsh contrasts. The whites are almost burning and the darks obscure the detail. While I would treat the photos differently today, it is interesting to see how these photographs in their current state reflect these unique experiences of boredom and search for something in the town stuck in time.
I assembled these photographs into a long photo montage that would spread into an accordion measuring 247cm. The length symbolizes the 24/7 monotony and time crawling day by day. The cover is an image of the New Mexico map crumpled into a tight ball with the town TorC visible on the surface, to illustrate the boredom I felt. The length serves symbolic value to express the monotone quality of the town, moreover expresses the passage of time from the cover to the end of the accordion, which is the girl today, more grown up, who has evolved and grown a more tender perception of the town. The last page displays an image of the map from the front cover, flattened and carefully folded, symbolizing her acceptance of the place and her developed appreciation for the town’s unique and humble character.
When I say home, I mean this town, but also I mean all of Southern New Mexico, the cities and villages down here spread out but stuffed into the same fever dream. There is no easy way to explain that here in the underbelly, south of the 34th parallel, which cuts the state in half, things are different.
Joshua Wheeler, Acid West
