Nothing serves to complicate a person’s halcyon view of life in America like watching their hometown dissolve at the core from corporate disinvestment. This was the case for Schenectady, NY — abandoned as General Electric relocated to the neighboring Niskayuna, and ALCO exited entirely — and witnessing the impact was a foundational experience that informs much intermedia artist David Opdyke’s work.
Paved With Good Intentions is a wall-sized installation that made its debut last month at University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities Gallery, and it, too, reconfigures the landscape of nostalgic America, with the most prominent piece, “This Land,” assembling and deftly intervening in 528 vintage postcards of US landmarks with scene of environmental disaster, plague, and foreboding.
“This Land” is tremendously impressive, with each postcard operating effectively as a microcosm of a world falling into chaos. Roughly two-thirds of the postcards conform to a grid which, view from afar, indicate a kind of impressionistic mountainscape, punctuated by lakes and wildlife. But the grid immediately begins to fracture, sloughing off chunks of postcards or individuals that seem to fall away into the whitespace beneath the tableau, with a handful scattered out onto the floor below.
