Regarding his work, the artist says:
When people from around the earth visit the island of Alcatraz, they are already informed to some extent about “the Rock.” The island’s philanthropic board, administrators, and rangers are allowing its symbolic meanings to thrive and expand, with the island open to art events, but also with an ongoing conscious meditation on the past and present of the crucial social issues of crime and incarceration. The island’s physical reality, textured and painted by climate, fascinates, but listening to the stories researched by a friend who is a night guide there can make the place feel haunted by the past. The ghosts evoked by its history might have found freedom at last, riding on the wind permitted here to flow through walls between the Pacific and the San Francisco Bay. I photographed what seemed a lyrical abstraction of floating rectangles, but felt, as well, the many meanings a ruin can evoke, as if such windows as these allow the past and the present to look at each other.
James McColley Eilers' verses, translations, essays, and photographs have been published in various literary magazines, including Subtropics, San Francisco Reader, Modern Words, Estero, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Mouth of the Dragon, Gay & Lesbian Review; on the websites InTranslation and Poetry Ark; and in the books, How to Bury a Goldfish (2000, 2008) and the anthology, Imprints (2014). His one-act play, Turning, was performed in San Francisco in 2001.
For the past to become vivid and full, it helps to have references designed to open our imaginations. James Eilors is a master at this. He revivifies history and restores nuance to the land. He dis-impoverishes us.