InTwelve Acres Henry O. Head reimagines the peaks and valleys of a defining teenage friendship in the Ozarks where he spent his adolescence. From spring 2023 through summer 2024, Head revisited the terrain of northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri. He returned to Ponca and Jasper, Purdy, Monett and Pioneer— wild country with limestone bluffs shot through with quartz, where cottonmouths coil on exposed roots by slow creeks, and alligator gar glide like phantoms through the dark.Twelve Acres recalls boyhood outside of city limits, in the shadows of sycamores, away from institutions and the pressures of social order. In a progression through the seasons, a restlessness presses in, a longing to stave off the rupture of entering an adult reality, with its responsibilities and mundanity. In this meditation on personal history, worlds quiver in a chaos of past and present forms and stark flashes of image begin to wobble in an opaque well. Tops spin. Animals with thirst cup liquid light. Memory remains an ineffable mystery. Twelve Acres is a reverie, wherein the past re-emerges as boys with tick-bitten feet, ears ringing from homemade explosives, clothes stained by the smoke of shoplifted cigarettes, and arms stretched toward higher branches.
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