Eleven years ago, I left Los-Angeles and exiled myself to the Northern California rural backwoods for a decade. I worked ceaselessly on a wide array of projects- living a very minimalistic lifestyle, and taking it one day at the time. The consequences of my personal “artist struggle” is that I barely left the area I lived in.

I decided to immerse myself completely into my habitat and explore the local history as well as the current conditions of the place. I began working with a pack of local young girls and one teenage local boy that recurrently appears in my photo series since many years.

I have been digging up the karma of the land and putting it in correlation with scenes of their daily life. The red current invading the images is inspired by the Clint Eastwood psychedelic acid Western “The high plain drifter” where the man with no name ordered the town of Lago painted red and renamed ‘Hell’.

The Red is a contamination effect that flows in the photos like a stream.

In this photographic series, it becomes clear that those teenage girls and the ‘last’ Native American boy have been brought up in a state of local desolation and share the dilemmas and sentiment of the people in relation to the history of their grounds. They inherited the karma of the land. It is historically and socially interesting to see the analogy of what used to be a Native American land and now, mainly white destitute and uncultured population. We are going from massacre to massacre…

People that never leave the county, which are most of the locals in Yuba and Nevada county are direct descendants of migrants from Oklahoma who travelled to California hoping to find the American dream during the Dust bowl and the Great Depression. They are still called “the Okies”.

In the Greek New Testament the word Paroikia means “temporary residence” Early Christians used this designation for their colonies because their considered heaven their real home. But temporary or not, these Christian colonies became more organized as time went on. Thus, in late latin, Parochial became the designation for a group of Christians in a given area under the leadership of one pastor. The term Parochial began to be used in this more “narrow”sense at the beginning of the 19th century.

What happened on this land before? What is happening now through my own pioneer eyes?

Maya Mercer, Marysville, 2019

installation views