Diane Durant

Texasville and Texasville (Revisited) have developed over the last eight years as I set out to document the growth, change, resistance, and clichés of my beloved Parker County, Texas—my specific experience becoming a stand-in for the universal truths of urban sprawl and rural community. Shot with the unpredictable, plastic lens of the Holga 120N, Texasville consists of a series of gelatin silver prints, ultrachrome inkjet prints, family relics, and text pieces that all work together to emphasize the narrative qualities inherent in installation art and the photographic sequence. Headlines clipped from the local paper, bits and pieces from fictions about the Southwest, and quirky things my grandmother says all complement the photographs, capturing what is both seen and heard in this part of the world—capturing us. Documenting the space within the boundaries of Parker County, the raw amateurism of Texasville relays to the viewer a sense of the raw, innocent, unfettered nature of the countryside while also memorializing a place, a family, and a time gone (going?) by. Returning to both the place and the images from this body of work, Texasville (Revisited) uses found objects, text, and photographs previously not printed for a new installation that serves to both inform the viewer in a documentary style as well as develop new characters and narrative details from previously established story lines, from the Brazos River to Exit 51 and every unremarkable stop in between.