By Emily Goodman
Contributing Writer
Images Provided by Elijah Howe

As our spring has been rocked by repeated natural disasters — including severe thunderstorms, tornados and historic flooding all in the span of four days — I have found myself thinking about the precariousness of place. All topographies are subject to their own forms of disasters, from the hurricanes along the Atlantic coast and the earthquakes and wildfires that rattle the West to the blizzards that pummel the North and the windstorms and tornados that batter the Midwest. And these are just the climate hazards of the United States. 

The forces of nature are, in many ways, the defining characteristic of a place. How humans build and rebuild, survive and thrive in the face of a natural world that is indifferent to their presence all characterize what it is to live in a particular place. The architecture, the food and even the demeanor of the people in a certain space all emerge in relation to the environment. We are informed, even defined by the nature that surrounds us, just as the nature around us is informed and even defined by us. 

This idea — that humans go on living in precarious spaces, even knowing full well the possibility of their destruction — is at the center of Elijah Howe’s project “Chained Rock,” on display through May 16 at 2^nd Story Gallery in Lexington. Telling the story of the imaginary town of Chained Rock, Howe’s show considers the kind of flourishing that can happen in marginal topographies, in particular the cycles of devastation and reconstruction that occur when nature has its way. 

The central mythology of Howe’s exhibition is the vulnerable location of “the town of Chained Rock.” Nestled beneath the real Chained Rock landmark and alongside the banks of the Cumberland River, the fictional town is presented as constantly under threat from the environment around it, or as Howe describes it, “between the river that that was below and would flood, and then the rock that was above that could fall.” 

Of course, the threat of Chained Rock isn’t really a threat. The monument, which is a real place in Pineville, Kentucky, was constructed in 1932, when a group of local citizens, unemployed due to the Depression (according to the KET documentary that Howe has altered and shows in the exhibition), decided to “secure” a boulder that seemed positioned to fall off the mountain onto the valley below. However, the boulder was never in danger of falling since it is simply a part of the hillside. Consequently, from the outset, the chain has functioned as a “kind of a joke,” as Howe puts it.

Through his work in this exhibition, Howe has deliberately added to the fiction surrounding this place, creating a series of documents that purport to portray the “town of Chained Rock,” a municipality that does not exist. Howe came up with the idea when he visited the real monument and “read the historical plaque there.” As Howe recounts, “It was just really interesting to me, this like mythology of this rock that is chained to the mountain that might fall at any moment, and the fact that the rock is not actually at all about to fall — it's part of the mountain. I just really liked the amount of effort that went into this mythology, and I thought it was a good metaphor for the town.” Howe used the idea that something appears to be real, and in many ways is real, to create a fiction through his documentary photography, gathering images from across the commonwealth and altering those from the region around Chained Rock in order to create a sense of a town that is both specific to this location and to none whatsoever. 

While the threat that the “Chained Rock” poses is utterly false, Howe’s work does not abandon truth altogether. The threat from the Cumberland River to this region is very real. As Howe was preparing for this show, the Cumberland River breached its banks in the historic flooding that swept across Southeastern Kentucky in February of this year. While it may not be specific to the “town of Chained Rock,” the devastation of floods is all too real in the area around Pineville, and truly statewide. 

It was the peril of flooding that spurred Howe to create the “town of Chained Rock.” He began constructing images of the “town” on a trip to Whitesburg, KY, when he and fellow MFA students at UK went to help with the restoration and preservation of Appalshop following the catastrophic flooding in 2022. The experience was jarring for Howe, a native of Northern California, who is more comfortable with wildfires than floods. He notes, “That was the first big flood damage I saw when I came here from California. So that just felt really important to the story, especially since everything's been flooding constantly since.”

But Howe’s interest in the impacts of living in flood-prone areas isn’t limited to documenting the devastation. In developing this project, he aimed to create a work about the people who have not just survived in the region but have thrived. He observes, “A lot of the themes of the project are these people that are in this place and life is kind of hard …. And I wanted to create a town where it is in this constant threat of danger, but it's also people's homes, where the place and the people there and the things that they have are really important and worth risking.” For Howe, the folklore he has created about the “town of Chained Rock” is really a story of resilience and a willingness to persevere even when nature presents challenges. It is about the strength of people who believe in where they are from and who have built a life, a culture and a home in the face of, and in spite of, the threats that surround it. 

The character that he ascribes to the residents of “Chained Rock” are attributes that Howe found within Kentuckians from across the commonwealth. As a recent transplant — albeit one who had both family connections and personal ones to the region — Howe began this project as a way to bear witness to the history and traditions of Kentucky, and to see what this place is for himself. He explains, “The way this project started was I was planning on visiting every town in Kentucky, and there's 1500 of them. So, I had my map with my little pins.”  

While Howe didn’t end up making it to every town in Kentucky, he did travel widely across the region, taking photographs along the way. In creating this project, Howe wanted to go beyond what other photographers have done in documenting the commonwealth. He remarks, “I think the thing that most people who are photographing Kentucky are drawn to is the human connection of the people and the humanity of situations that they're in. And a lot of times it comes off as just showing [people] going through hardship … but it becomes the main point. And I think the things that I was interested in were the people and their stories and their experience.”