FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Artist Bethany Springer asked one question of 12 elderly residents of Memphis, Tenn.: “If you could fly anywhere in Memphis, where would you go and why?” What they told her opened up a new direction for an art project that became Flyover Territory.

“The responses were unexpected and nearly unanimous,” Springer said. “Most interviewees chose not to be in Memphis.”

Springer, an assistant professor of art at the University of Arkansas, interviewed a randomly selected sample of residents of nursing and rehabilitation centers in Memphis. Ten were African American, and she found that their private stories were influenced by “overlapping concerns with issues of violence, progress, equality and power.” The power of the stories they told her shaped the piece to the extent that she describes herself as the conductor, rather than the creator, of the project. 

Flyover Territory currently shows as part of Made Public, an exhibit at the Memphis College of Art’s On the Street gallery, curated by Sanjit Sethi to explore notions of public and private space. The gallery is located across the street from the Lorraine Hotel, the site of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and now the façade for the Civil Rights Museum, and the sound portion of Springer’s piece is piped out to the street.

Inside the gallery, the sound is accompanied by projected images from Google Earth. The video is projected onto the floor in an eight-foot by seven-foot rectangle that viewers can walk around. While images on a computer screen or a wall are expected to be viewed with north at the top, that standard orientation is lost when the image is on the floor and viewers can walk around it.

“I wanted to physically place the viewer between audio and video, or between the intimate memory of the site as captured in audio versus the disengaged video of the corresponding site. The effect of seeing Google Earth images on the floor as if you were flying is at times nauseating and disorienting,” Springer said.

One testimony represented a collective voice, according to Springer, and in Flyover Territory she pairs the voice of 84-year-old James Mitchell with aerial imagery from Google Earth, juxtaposing his stories of the places he’d lived with their appearance today. Given the ease of peeking at a place with Google Earth, Springer wondered what it was we couldn’t see. The people she interviewed revealed what was going on in their private worlds, both today and in the past.

Mitchell talks of toting water for cotton-pickers near Germantown, Tenn., during the Depression. As he recalls being 11 years old and earning 25 cents a day for 10 hours work, the Google image swoops over Germantown today with its golf course and country club. Eventually Mitchell worked as a chauffeur for a Memphis accountant, and he speaks with pride of the good cars he always drove.

Mitchell remembers clearly the violence of the past. He was in Memphis when King was killed and recalls how dangerous it was. The Memphis of today is more frightening for him: “You can’t go to sleep at night — someone come in your house and kill you. I don’t want to be here. Too dangerous.”

His memories of his birthplace, Olive Branch, Miss., are fond. He would like to go back there to buy cheese at the cheese plant and go to the picture show for a dime. Remembering its relative safety, he says, “Never knew no one who got killed then.”

In her artist’s statement, Springer wrote of her interest in boundaries and territories, public and private.

“Since moving from New York City to the Midwest (aka Flyover Territory) in 2004, I have been particularly interested in the perception of place as determining a state of either connection or disconnection,” Springer wrote.

“Ultimately, I see my sculpture and video work as situational experiments that monitor awareness in a constantly accelerating world,” Springer concluded.

Springer is an assistant professor of art in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas.

Made Public is on exhibit through March 28. In addition to Springer, the exhibit includes the work of artists Hiroharu Mori and Robin Pacific. The video Flyover Territory is available at http://dailyheadlines.uark.edu/video/flyover_video.html .