The photographs in Year of the Fallen Oak were made in the Cumberland Plateau during a time of grief and transition: the unexpected death of Rachel Boillot’s father-in-law Doug, the birth of her husband Derrick’s first grandchildren, and their move to Arkansas for a job. The making of this work has been a process of saying goodbye to what was, a series of unresolved gestures echoing through time. Loss and vulnerability are topics explored together as Boillot asks her new family members to photograph with her in a spirit of reciprocity and exchange, collaborating in a shared exploration of place and memory.

The American Civil War remains a polarizing and formative event in American history and memory, one that still clearly marks a divisive fissure in the United States.  Every year, millions of Americans visit the sites where thousands fell fighting to either uphold white supremacy or to break the chains and give birth to a new freedom, one more closely aligned with the universality proposed by the framers of the U.S. Constitution: that all people are created equal.