Mirage:
Energy, W Â ater and Creativity in the Great Basin Sun Valley Center for the Arts
cover: Cedra Wood, Mares (The Viewer’s Back to Tonopah Test Range), 2019, acrylic on panel, courtesy the artist back cover: Andrea Zittel, Wall Sprawl #4 (Las Vegas, Next to Nellis Air Force Base), 2011, inkjet on J15 Blueback paper, © Andrea Zittel, courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Mirage:
Energy, W ater and Creativity in the Great Basin Sun Valley Center for the Arts June 12–August 23, 2019
Boise Art Museum August 15, 2020–January 3, 2021
Special thanks to Gail Severn Gallery, Ketchum, Idaho Holt/Smithson Foundation Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York Prestel Verlag, Munich Regen Projects, Los Angeles Yale University Art Gallery Mirage is supported in part by generous grants from the Robert Lehman Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Those of us who live in the American West recognize the myth and mystique that writers, filmmakers, novelists, governmental agencies and private businesses have long cultivated about the land west of the Mississippi. Much of our nation’s history and values are embedded in complicated notions about the freedom, expanse and possibility of the American West. The Great Basin, an area that includes nearly the entire state of Nevada and parts of five surrounding states, is a special microcosm within that larger idea of the West. Home to only a few national parks and monuments and even fewer metropolitan areas, much of the Great Basin is sparsely populated, with large swaths managed by a complex web of federal and state agencies. It is an area that many Americans travel through rather than to, but to dismiss it as uninteresting grazing lands and vast salt flats would be a mistake. The Sun Valley Center for the Arts chose to pursue an exhibition on the Great Basin in part because it lies in our backyard, so to speak, and it can be both fruitful and nurturing to spend time in one’s own backyard. But we were also drawn to the Great Basin for the same reasons it has long attracted artists and government agencies—its out-of-the-wayness, its vastness and its obscurity. Additionally, the Sun Valley Center for the Arts’ consideration of the Great Basin builds on the organization’s long history of projects that explore the social history, geography and environment of the American West. This exhibition follows a 2016 exhibition project that focused on the unique landscapes of Craters of the Moon National Monument and precedes an in-progress exhibition project examining Idaho’s Camas Prairie that will open in May 2020. As we considered how best to frame and name this project, the wavy, floating mirages caused by expanses of salt and sand reflecting the sun seemed an apt metaphor for the mysteries embedded in this land. A geographic area that has been able to comfortably contain both hard-to-reach Land art projects and remote nuclear test sites, the Great Basin has been the
K RISTIN P OO L E
Artistic Director foundation of fascinating projects that illustrate our human capacity for both creation and destruction. But the most compelling reason for The Center to embark on this exhibition project was ultimately the interest and work of artists who we respect and admire. Learning that Fazal Sheikh and Laura McPhee were at work on new bodies of work focused on the Great Basin prompted conversations with Cedra Wood and Frances Ashforth about developing new work and then with Emmet Gowin about revisiting older work alongside his more recent images. Andrea Zittel’s innovative claim on and use of her piece of land in the Great Basin is enriched and deepened by including the work of earlier Land artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Gathering the work of these remarkable artists and commissioning new work is made possible by the generosity of The Center’s members and patrons. We are profoundly fortunate to work for a community whose generosity is matched by their interest in and engagement with the world. We are beholden to the Robert Lehman Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts for their continued support of significant exhibitions and grateful to the Holt/ Smithson Foundation for their assistance in lending their artists’ films and images. Jane Watkins has not only financially supported the exhibition but helped shepherd it, serving as its nexus by connecting us to several of the participating artists. Terry Tempest Williams, along with Fazal Sheikh, kindly allowed us to reprint the text they jointly wrote as an introduction to their project Exposure. Curator of Visual Arts Courtney Gilbert’s ability to connect the dots between an idea, contemporary artists’ efforts and this community’s interest in place— and then knit them together into a cohesive and compelling exhibition—is a special skill and one that we all benefit from. It is our hope that this exhibition illuminates a landscape that has benefited from obscurity and nurtures our collective fascination with the complex story of a nation, a land, and those who live on and with it.
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J EN N Y EM ERY DAVIDSO N, Ph.D. Executive Director, The Community Library
Middle of Nowhere
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fter filling a 5-gallon red jerry can with gasoline, and a 5-gallon white plastic tank with water, we drive west out of Salt Lake City along the drifting southern edge of Great Salt Lake, then turn south toward Tooele. As we drive away from the Wasatch Mountains, the Cedar Range peaks rise to the west, and the rust-colored Kennecott Open Cut Copper Mine accordions to the east. We keep driving south. At the little town of Vernon, we fill the truck with gas until it tops the tank. Then we turn west for the long haul.
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landscape. When we arrive at our destination — a quiet spring with the faintest brush of green — we have to wake ourselves from a trance, blink our eyes. It’s hard to get oriented in such big country.
We are on a dirt road now, the old Pony Express route, and we pass a sign that warns of no services ahead. It is hot. The mountains in the distance remain incessantly so, even as the miles tick by on the odometer. The map tells us that the Dugway Proving Grounds and Deseret Test Center lie to the north, the Sevier Desert and the Confusion Range to the south, but at 55 miles per hour, it all blurs together in sage and sky. Even the barbed-wire fence lines are invisible, but we hear the wind humming along the wires. Occasionally, a dirt devil spins and gathers itself into a looming giant, then disappears.
“This is no single parcel of land easily swallowed,” writes the naturalist Stephen Trimble in The Sagebrush Ocean, “but a giant sweep of the West, sparsely populated and largely unknown, covering most of Nevada, the West Desert of Utah, the southeastern corners of Oregon and Idaho, and California east of the Sierra” (5). Trimble starts with these geographical boundaries, but then moves to oxymorons. It is, he writes, “a closed inland sea of desert [. . . and the] deserts are poisoned with salt and the mountains are drifted with snow. Beyond the sagebrush horizon the pale ranges go on and on, in rhythms that give the silent land its music” (16). Trimble compares the desert to the ocean; he juxtaposes the antithetical elements of salt and snow to reveal the region’s extremes; he describes the basin-and-range topography in terms of sound. To understand the Great Basin, he suggests, requires embracing paradox.
We drive for hours toward the Deep Creek Mountains on the border of Utah and Nevada, and in that distance our eyes increasingly migrate toward the wide horizon, overlooking the persistent expanse of sagebrush and shadscale. Small details drain away into the basin
The motivation of our current trip into the West Desert indeed feels paradoxical: In this sprawling, dry landscape, we are looking for small, water-bound frogs. The species — the Columbia spotted frog — is declining, and Mark, who is working for the Utah Division of
Wildlife Resources at the time, is tasked with tracking as many as possible with tiny electronic devices. I join him for a weekend to help, and to see for myself this place he’s been exploring. He’s been returning home to the city covered in dust and a bit wide-eyed and newly obsessed with The Twilight Zone and The X Files. So, while I think I’m pretty familiar with the region, I’m curious. Superficially, you might think you can comprehend the whole Great Basin within a mile or two —but then it goes on and on. I grew up on the edge of it, just south of the Snake River Canyon in Idaho, and all through my childhood, our family vacations involved all-day road trips through that high desert — to one grandparents’ house in Utah or another’s in Arizona. My sisters and I poked each other and whined and made a game of calling out exotic license plates that we spotted on the rare passing cars; my mother parsed out snacks that we weren’t normally allowed to eat; my dad cranked up Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band Live from the tape deck. And for long stretches of time, we all just stared out the window at the relentless miles of sagebrush until our minds turned in on themselves and we each dreamed of other things in the metal cocoon of the speeding car. The Great Basin was part of our psyches that we didn’t think to see, deeply familiar and also overlooked. It was the long stretch between gas stations. My perspective shifted during my college years when I worked each summer on a wildland fire crew for the Bureau of Land Management. We chased smoke columns to fires in the desert between Idaho, Utah, and Nevada, sometimes unsure which state we were in. In the Great Basin, fires run fast and can scorch thousands of acres, even tens of thousands, in a couple of days — there is nothing to stop them, and often no one to notice — but they usually die quickly, too. What was a raging, roaring inferno at four in the afternoon was often a quiet haze by the time the sun rose in the morning. Then, for the next week, we would patrol the fire line, squinting into the horizon to distinguish blowing ash from clouds from fresh smoke. We knew the wind could raise a few hot embers
and the fire would surge again, so we took days to be convinced that the fire was out. I came to see the desert as potentially explosive; what had appeared monotonous on those long family drives could be fantastically mercurial. So, by the time I go looking for spotted frogs, I am in my twenties, and I have seen a good share of the Great Basin region. On the drive from Salt Lake City, we watch mirages undulate on the road ahead of us most of the way, so when we really do arrive at standing water, at first it seems unreal. It is a quiet seep, shimmering through tall grasses that are green near the water but brushed gold at their tips. Perhaps even more surreal, however, is a handful of multi-story houses rising starkly from the desert, here in the middle of nowhere, and the sleek black military planes that slash across the sky in ones and twos. We pull on hip waders and push gently through the spring looking for the slightest curves in the water: two black eyes and a spotted back. When I am quick enough to snag one, the frog fits in the palm of my hand like a small wet clod of the earth itself. We do this for hours, and the giant basin landscape shrinks to the graceful wisp of the spring, until nightfall shifts our gaze upward to the emerging stars. A few lights shine enigmatically from the windows of those houses in the distance. The whole basin is still — until another shadowy military jet swoops through the darkness like a manta ray in the deep sea. A short roar follows. And then a louder silence. The lights go out on the hill. The eerie notes of The X Files push their way into my mind, grating against sleep. We’re on the dark side of the moon. When the explorer John C. Fremont encountered the Great Basin in 1844 for the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, it was shrouded, for him and the country, in “delightful obscurity.” The continent was, in fact, claimed by multiple nations, and the Great Basin region was in Mexican territory. But Fremont was an ambitious agent of expansionism, and he ventured across political borders, poised to see pastoral possibilities along with fantastical phenomena. The Great Salt Lake and its surroundings, Fremont wrote, “possessed for us
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a strange and extraordinary interest,” and they reveled in speculations about it around the fire at night. Many believed that a “terrible whirlpool” connected the lake to the Pacific Ocean, and they imagined that the lake’s mysterious islands would be “a tangled wilderness of trees and shrubbery, teeming with game of every description” (17). Of course, when Fremont and a few select men, including Kit Carson, finally reached the lake and canoed to one of the islands, it did not meet their expectations. They did not find a lush paradise. The island where they landed was not “teeming with wild game,” but was littered with the “skins of worms [. . .] which had been washed up by the waters of the lake” (154). As a result of the “dissipation of [their] dream of the fertile islands,” Fremont named it Disappointment. Still, the night he spent on the lake he ultimately recalled as “one of the most interesting nights” of the whole expedition as he listened to the “roar of an ocean surf” in the middle of his inland journey. Though the islands proved to be barren, and the water was dense with salt, and the land was rough and arid, Fremont’s final assessment of Great Salt Lake was that it was “truly a bucolic region” (160).
Today, more than 150 years later, rail lines and interstates and airways and off-road vehicle tracks penetrate the Great Basin, and yet Fremont’s description of the region as “solitary,” “uninhabited,” and “naked” might seem applicable still. The Great Basin remains startlingly enigmatic. The writer Barry Lopez claims that it “is one of the least novelized, least painted, least eulogized of American landscapes” (Trimble xi). There is something noble about how long the Great Basin has resisted being “finished” on any terms but its own, and also something mournful about it being so long elided.
A century and a half later, I’m growing up in this “truly bucolic region.” My family drives the length of it on well-paved highways with unbroken sagebrush stretching to the horizon on either side. I earn good money for college by chasing smoke and fighting fires in it. I look for spotted frogs in it. I know that I can go for miles and hours on scratched-in two-track roads without seeing a person, a structure, or a waterway. I sometimes get surprised by a lone rogue cow, or the sudden roar of a military jet, or the glint of metal on a roof in a secluded commune.
The vast landscape is, in fact, crossed with invisible lines of competing claims and complex stories and desires. Military test sites. Survivalist compounds. Wilderness areas. Spotted frogs. Arrowheads. Springs. All blurred together in sagebrush and sky and blowing sand. It is the middle of nowhere — hard to reach and hard to fathom fully. It arouses my curiosity, verging unexpectedly into glory. The longer I know it, the more I am drawn to it with the hope of hearing the drum acoustics of a sage grouse lek, of seeing the arced flight of a curlew above its nest, of being caught up in the distance.
And sometimes I am deceived in it: I hear the rattle of a snake where there is only bonedry grass. I see two black eyes on the surface of shallow water where there is only the blinking shadow of reeds. I get dizzy watching a night sky dense with glimmering stars, and I think I see two lights spin to the ground. There is so much space, my thoughts run away from me.
In her memoir Refuge, Terry Tempest Williams interfolds a natural history of the Great Basin with the story of her own family in the midst of disease and grief. “[I]n the forsaken corners of Great Salt Lake,” she writes, “there is no illusion of being safe.” The sense of exposure frightens and liberates and comforts her, all at once, as her personal emotional landscape becomes raw with rage and sorrow at her mother’s cancer. The desert that others dismiss as a
“Bucolic” is never the word that comes to mind.
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In 1854, a decade after his first exploration of the Great Basin, Fremont wrote a report to Congress making a case for completing the railroad that would connect the nation from coast to coast, specifically crossing the Great Basin. He surmised, “The solitary character of this uninhabited region, and naked valleys without water courses, among mountains with fertile soil and grass and woods abundant, give it the appearance of an unfinished country” (“Letter” 6). It was, he argued, a void that needed to be spanned to realize the potential of the nation.
place for “razor blades, toxins, and biological warfare,” for her is a site of redemption (221). “It’s strange how deserts turn us into believers,” she writes, “If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide, and so we are found” (148).
of sight. We just get a glimpse of a trace: The ripple behind a frog that slipped into the reeds. The soundwaves behind a shadowy plane. A plume of smoke erupting into a cloud. In this hard, unbounded country, the seams between the real and the imagined may be looser than we think.
It makes me wonder like no place else.
The Great Basin beckons us to look hard at where things get hazy on the horizon, just where it is difficult to discern where the solid ground ends and the liquid mirage begins. There always seems to be something more just out
Works Cited Fremont, John. C. The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains. 1845. Introd. Herman J. Viola and Ralph E. Ehrenberg. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988. ---. “Letter of J.C. Fremont to the Editors of the National Intelligencer.” 33rd Cong., 1st session. S. Doc. 67. June 15, 1854. Stegner, Wallace. “Living Dry.” The American West as Living Space. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1987. Trimble, Stephen. The Sagebrush Ocean: A Natural History of the Great Basin. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1989. Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
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COU RT N E Y GIL B ERT, Ph.D. Curator of Visual Arts
Mirage:
Energy, W ater and Creativity in the Great Basin
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he Great Basin is a vast expanse of land covering much of the American West, with its rivers draining internally rather than to the ocean. Its boundaries circumscribe parts of Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Wyoming and California, and nearly all of Nevada. The idea of a closed watershed system is a useful metaphor for thinking about this uniquely dynamic landscape as a source of regenerative power: a place of resource extraction and renewable energy; a place that has long generated creativity (including Land Art works); and a place of shifting boundaries. The Great Basin is also a place of contradictions. Much of it is desert, but it is home to multiple ecosystems and topographies; this incongruity mirrors the fact that though the area is now largely arid, it was once an inland sea. Despite the fact that it holds vast stretches of open, unoccupied land, it is a place of mystery and obscurity. Its scale allows individuals, corporations and government agencies to do things there they can’t do elsewhere, from creating monumental artworks on the land to extracting natural resources or installing enormous wind and solar farms, from testing weapons to experimenting with technology. It is a place that has long inspired artists, including those whose work is part of Mirage—Frances Ashforth, Emmet Gowin, Nancy Holt, Laura McPhee, Fazal Sheikh, Robert Smithson, Cedra Wood and Andrea Zittel—each drawn to the Great Basin’s
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unique landscapes and abundant paradoxes. The idea for an exhibition responding to the Great Basin grew out of my conversations with photographer Laura McPhee, who spends much of each year in Idaho’s Wood River and Sawtooth Valleys. For a number of years, McPhee has been working on Desert Chronicle, a project inspired by her great-grandmother’s work as an itinerant schoolteacher in Nevada, traveling with her two daughters from town to town to educate the children of miners and ranchers. Desert Chronicle also draws on McPhee’s husband’s ancestors, who settled in Nevada’s Ruby Valley in the 1870s. Tracing these two separate but overlapping histories, McPhee has traveled through the deserts and mountains of the Great Basin, making photographs informed by her personal connection to its landscapes as well as larger issues having to do with the environment and land use. McPhee’s photographs approach the history of the Great Basin on both geologic and human scales. From images of the detritus left behind in abandoned towns to photographs of the infrastructure of contemporary gold mines and solar installations, McPhee’s work considers the human relationship to the landscape of the Great Basin as a place of reinvention, exploitation and renewal. Some photographs are the result of intensely close observation; others convey the basin’s
vastness—vastness that sometimes obscures both the ecological and human activity these spaces contain, despite the fact that so much of that activity exists on the land’s surface. As McPhee writes in her essay in this catalogue, “Underlying its indelible and often tragic human stories, the Great Basin’s hot and cold deserts, its hidden creeks and ephemeral saline lakes, its glacial valleys and inland marshes, peat bogs and alkali playas—that is to say its surface geology—is enhanced for this photographer by the simple fact that in huge expanses of this predominantly public land, most everything is there for the looking, laid bare by the wind and arid climate.” This exposure, as McPhee points out, rewards close looking and offers “the sensation that time is visible, that you can hold it in your hand.” Like Laura McPhee, the photographer Emmet Gowin (with whom McPhee studied at Princeton University) has pursued several projects considering the human relationship to land in the American West. Gowin began working in the West in 1980, making work that was a d eparture from the photographs of his wife, Edith, and their family that he became well known for in the 1970s. As Gowin has written, his work taking aerial photographs of the Nevada Test Site and other landscapes in the American West emerged out of a series of unexpected events, starting with the 1980
eruption of Mount St. Helens, which led to his first experience photographing from an airplane. The opportunity to photograph a different part of Washington State, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, guided his interest in documenting nuclear infrastructure within the United States, from missile silos in North Dakota to the Nevada Test Site. Gowin waited more than eight years for permission to photograph the Nevada Test Site, which he was finally allowed to photograph from a military helicopter in December 1996. He returned for several more flights in 1997, recording Department of Energy infrastructure and the scarring and cratering created by underground testing. Mirage includes 10 photographs that record the landscapes of the Nevada Test Site, the site of more than 900 nuclear tests (100 above ground, 828 underground) over more than four decades. Six photographs in the exhibition reveal the long-term effects of other human activities on the surface of the Great Basin’s landscapes. These images, which include off-road traffic patterns on the shore of the Great Salt Lake, Laura McPhee, Hycroft mining exploration, Gold Mine, Black Rock and munitions storDesert, Nevada, 2012, archival pigment print, age and disposal, courtesy the artist and illuminate the fragilGail Severn Gallery, ity of desert ecosysKetchum, Idaho; tems. Documenting photo: Dev Khalsa
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2016, recommending the elimination or reduction of six monuments, including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah. Grand Staircase-Escalante is currently defined by the Great Basin’s boundary on its northern edge, a natural definition it may lose if the monument is reduced in size.
ifferent parts of the d Great Basin, Gowin’s photographs are unified in their emphasis on the particular quality of light in the deserts where he’s worked. He writes of his unexpected revelation that a place could be both beautiful and terrible at the same time while photographing the Hanford Nuclear Reservation: “I could see it in the light as the light touched the ground. I told myself that this is probably one of the most poisoned places in the world. How can it be beautiful? It was as if the light didn’t care and the sun didn’t think.”1 Emmet Gowin, installation view; photo: Dev Khalsa
The artist Fazal Sheikh also studied with Emmet Gowin at Princeton University, and has spent the last two years working on a project that has resulted in aerial photographs made in the Great Basin as well. In 2017, the U.S. Department of the Interior reviewed 27 national monuments created between 1996 and Fazal Sheikh, installation view; photo: Dev Khalsa
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In response to proposed monument reduction, Fazal Sheikh and the writer Terry Tempest Williams embarked on Exposure, a collaborative project considering the future of these public lands when their monument status is lifted. The photographs included in Mirage come from the first volume of Sheikh’s expanded project, The Exposure Trilogy, a three-volume set of books that will culminate in a traveling exhibition. Sheikh describes The Exposure Trilogy as, “aerial interrogations of sites of extractive industry (oil, gas, uranium and coal) in the Four Corners area,”2 and also a consideration of “Wastelanding,” in Sheikh’s words, the notion that within the desert, “many modes of toxicity and exploitation of the environment and its people persist.”3 Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante are unique among national monuments in that they mark the first time the U.S. government has worked cooperatively with native tribes, including the Utah Diné Bikéyah, to establish a land management agreement. Both Exposure and The Exposure Trilogy recognize the significance of that cooperation as well as the deep impact that resource extraction and nuclear testing have had on native peoples in the region. Most of Sheikh’s photographs in Mirage depict the effects of industrial extraction on the surface of the desert. Others illuminate the ways government agencies have exploited remote lo-
cations within the Great Basin, storing munitions at Tooele Army Depot, for example, or, during World War II, imprisoning Japanese-American citizens at Topaz Internment Camp, located in central Utah relatively near both uranium mines and the Nevada Test Site. One photograph works in counterpoint to the others, proposing the Great Basin as a site for creative energy, where the extraction of basalt provided the material for Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. Yet, as Sheikh points out, Spiral Jetty exists within an ecosystem much different than it did when it was newly finished, due to increased salinity and lower water levels in the northern half of the lake, as well as potential drilling near the earthwork’s site. While Gowin’s silver gelatin prints capture the particular quality of light in the desert, Sheikh’s photographs convey the Great Basin’s palette. They reveal subtle variations in the color of the desert’s surface, as well as more startling contrasts, like the bright pink water in the northern Great Salt Lake, the blue and green ponds at the US Magnesium plant, or the nearly black embankment landfill disposal cells for nuclear waste at the Clive Disposal Site. The idea of the Great Basin as a place of extremes is central to the work of painter Cedra Wood, as well. Wood’s paintings blend hyperrealism and fantasy in enigmatic images that consider the human relationship to the land and the creatures that inhabit it. As she has
written, she works with the “ideas of belonging and survival,” interweaving “human characters and natural environments, sometimes mimicking the tactics of other, better-adapted creatures” in works that imbue the landscape with allegorical meaning and draw on folklore, mythology, humor and the surreal.4 For Mirage, the Sun Valley Center for the Arts commissioned Wood to take a series of road trips throughout the Great Basin and respond to its landscapes in a new body Cedra Wood, Pine Cone of work. The resulting Shroud (Sagehen Creek paintings and sculpExperimental Forest, Sierra Nevada), 2019, tures illustrate the acrylic on panel; Pine extremes in topograCone Cloak, 2018, phy and ecosystems Jeffrey’s pine cone she encountered on scales, cotton thread, her travels. At each of courtesy the artist; photo: Dev Khalsa her stops, Wood encountered something unusual, either natural or man-made, that Cedra Wood, Fishbone Beast, 2019, fish bones inspired her work: the from Salton Sea shore, lint collected annupapier-mâché, courtesy ally from the Lehman the artist; Caves at Great Basin photo: Dev Khalsa
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National Park, replanted forests still scarred by fire in the eastern Sierra Nevada, empty multistriped highways near Tonopah Test Range in Nevada, piles of Tilapia bones at the shrinking Salton Sea, the ghost of the original Saltair Pavilion at the edge of the Great Salt Lake. Wood’s travels resulted in paintings and sculptures that invite viewers to discover the Great Basin’s landscapes and oddities alongside the artist. As part of her process, Wood often builds models that she then works from while painting. To make the paintings in Mirage, she collected cones from Jeffrey pines in California forests, painstakingly sewing them together into a floor-length mantle that cloaks a mysterious figure in Pine Cone Shroud. Fish skeletons and scales have become the Fishbone Beast, a frightening creature that emerges from the Salton Sea in Accumulated Matter, and lint from Lehman Caves cover three lint monster sculptures, figures who appear lurking at the mouth of the cave system in Slow Growth. Looking back on her journeys, Wood has written of her experience as similar to that of a character from a fairy tale who with one eye sees beauty and glamour, and with the other sees decay and the unnatural. These two poles merge in her work, illuminating an environment in which varied ecosystems, and the ways that people interact with them, are continually in flux.
Frances Ashforth, Summer Lake 1 and Summer Lake 2, 2019, Akua and Charbonel ink on Arches 88, courtesy the artist; photo: Dev Khalsa
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Drawn to the Great Basin part because of its hydrology, painter and printmaker Frances Ashforth has made a series of luminous monotypes that are an expression of her lifelong fascination with water. As she notes in her essay in this catalogue, she sees that fascination mirrored in the science writer Loren Eisley’s comment in The Immense Journey: “If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” Ashforth’s works marry her belief in that magic with her interest in the science of water and conservation. Mirage includes monotypes made from her memories of time spent in two distinct parts of the northern Great Basin: the Ana River in Oregon and the Bear River in Utah. Just 7 miles long, the Ana River empties into Summer Lake, supporting migratory birds and other animals as it flows south through a series of canyons. Ashforth has been a resident at Playa at Summer Lake twice, working alongside writers and scientists and learning about the unique geology and hydrology of the river and lake, which, despite its name, is usually dry lakebed in the summer. The prints she made in response to her time at Playa convey the drama of the landscape and its water cycles. During one of her residencies, an enormous storm hovered just to the south for several days, producing clouds that seemed to station themselves on the horizon. In Ashforth’s prints, cloud forms merge with the mesas that surround Playa, making land and sky nearly indistinguishable.
Andrea Zittel, Prototype for Billboard at A-Z West: Body in Space with Object #1, 2011, AC plywood, Polyurethane, matte acrylic paint; and Wall Sprawl #4 (Las Vegas, Next to Nellis Air Force Base), 2011, inkjet on J15 Blueback paper, © Andrea Zittel, courtesy Regen Projects; photo: Dev Khalsa
Originally a tributary of the Snake River, the Bear River was cut off by lava flows and diverted into what was once Lake Bonneville. Today, the lower 10 miles are preserved as the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. It is a place Ashforth has visited numerous times. Relying heavily on her memories of a given landscape to make her prints, she speaks of the importance of spending time in a place in order to understand it, carefully observing the land and the life within it. The shimmering images Ashforth made after spending time along the Bear River and on Antelope Island use the stark white of the Arches 88 paper she works with to convey the endless white expanse of the salt flats near the Great Salt Lake. These prints capture the mirage-like visual experience of the watery landscapes in the region, where the lines between water, air and land are difficult to discern. Artist Andrea Zittel has found room for creative experimentation in the arid open spaces of the desert landscape in the Great Basin’s southwest corner. Born and raised on the outskirts of San Diego, Zittel grew up in a place that felt rural when she was a child but suburban by the time she left for college. As a young artist, she moved east, living in New York for a decade before returning to her home state in 1998, settling near Joshua Tree.
After she arrived, Zittel began acquiring parcels of land that became home to A–Z West, an artwork located on more than 70 acres adjacent to Joshua Tree National Park. Zittel describes A–Z West as “an evolving testing grounds for living—a place in which spaces, objects, and acts of living all intertwine into a single ongoing investigation into what it means to exist and participate in our culture today.”5 Among other elements, A–Z West incorporates Zittel’s home and studio (or “testing grounds”), the Wagon Station Encampment (units for living and sleeping that Zittel designed for visitors), cabins, and a 10-acre parcel for High Desert Test Sites, a place for annual collaborative experimental projects. Like land artists in the 1970s, Zittel has chosen to work on a site that allows for creative practice at a scale that would be difficult to achieve elsewhere. While much of her focus is on the practice of daily life, she also investigates land use within the deserts of the Southwest, from the history of homesteading to the expansion of cities and suburbs. She’s particularly interested in the U.S. military’s relationship with the region. This exhibition includes Wall Sprawl #4, wallpaper Zittel designed using satellite imagery. Zittel chose images of sites that exist at the intersection of wilderness and develop-
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ment—in this case, a satellite image of Las Vegas, next to Nellis Air Force Base, using tiling and mirroring to “get at that idea of an infinite sprawl.”6 The grid structure that underlies Zittel’s Wall Sprawl project links to her broader interest in the settlement of the American West through the division of land into a grid of small parcels for homesteaders, 5- and 10-acre parcels like those Zittel has acquired for A–Z West. There is also an underlying connection between Zittel’s interest in the grid and her Prototypes for Billboards, a series of large paintings on plywood that includes Prototype for Billboard at A–Z West: Body in Space with Object #1 (2011). Zittel has long explored the idea of vertical planes as transmitters of ideas and ideology. In Body in Space with Object #1, she draws on the visual language of advertising to depict herself standing in the desert at A–Z West, dressed in one of the seasonal uniforms she’s known for wearing. As it has for Zittel, the Great Basin offered Land Artists working in the 1970s, including Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, the opportunity to execute large-scale projects in remote landscapes relatively untouched by development. Vast open spaces and inexpensive real estate allowed Holt and Smithson to create works outside (and far from) the traditional institutional structures of the art world. Mirage includes Holt’s film Sun Tunnels and Smithson’s film Spiral Jetty, both made during their work on
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970, Great Salt Lake, Utah, Collection of Dia Art Foundation, Photography: Gianfranco Gorgoni; © Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation, Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
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their earthworks of the same name. Alongside these films are exhibition prints of photographs made shortly after each artist completed their respective earthworks. Perhaps the best-known earthwork, Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), is sited on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake. The work is a 1,500-foot-long, 15-footwide coil of locally excavated black basalt and earth, embedded with salt crystals and varying levels of lake water. Since its completion, Spiral Jetty has been submerged under the pink waters of the Great Salt Lake for extended periods of time, emerging during times of drought. Smithson was deeply interested in the idea of entropy and embraced the notion that the sculpture would inevitably change through time, erosion, and other natural processes, including the rising and falling of water levels. Nancy Holt executed numerous works of public art and land art during her lifetime, and she is likely best known for Sun Tunnels (1973–1976), located in the Great Basin Desert of northwest Utah. Like Smithson, Holt was drawn to the open skies and remote landscapes of the Great Basin, which allowed her to work at a scale difficult to achieve elsewhere. Sun Tunnels consists of four concrete cylinders, each 18 feet in length and 9 feet in diameter, set into the land in an open cross formation that aligns with the summer and winter solstices. Each tunnel features drilled holes that correspond to
Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, 1973-76, Great Basin Desert, Utah, C ollection Dia Art Foundation with support from Holt/Smithson Foundation, Photography: Nancy Holt; © Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation, Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
different constellations: Capricorn, Columba, Draco and Perseus. The shadows these holes cast within the tunnels trace the earth’s rotation, while the tunnels themselves frame views of the desert landscape into which the tunnels are set. Like Smithson, Holt was interested in the idea of time, creating a work that invites consideration of time on multiple scales: diurnal, seasonal and cosmic. Today both Spiral Jetty and Sun Tunnels are part of Dia Art Foundation’s collection. Dia works with multiple partners, including Holt/ Smithson Foundation, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Center for Land Use Interpretation and Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College to advocate for these two earthworks. Their joint commitment to the future of these iconic works reflects a growing awareness of the fragility of the Great Basin’s ecosystems and resources, an awareness that the artwork in Mirage illustrates. Emmet Gowin’s photographs capture the long-term effects of human activity on the land’s surface, while Fazal Sheikh’s work responds to the potential threat that extraction industries pose to public lands. Cedra Wood paints
landscapes in constant flux, using fantasy to explore the extremes, while Frances Ashforth’s investigations of water cycles illustrate wide variations in topography and terrain. Mindful of the increase of sprawling development throughout the Southwest, Andrea Zittel utilizes the desert’s open spaces for creative experimentation, just as Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson chose similar landscapes decades earlier for their own projects. And in the work of Laura McPhee, these ideas come together in images that consider the Great Basin as a place that people have long exploited not just for natural resources, but also to reinvent themselves. In one of McPhee’s photographs, two girls stand at the edge of the Great Salt Lake holding sparklers that illuminate the dusk around them, their movements traced in their blurred and doubled figures. In the distance, we can just make out the outlines of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty. It is a photograph of a place of magic, and of possibility.
Philip Brookman, “Keys Are Stronger than the Doors They Open: A Dialogue with Emmet Gowin,” in Jock Reynolds, Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 2002), 153. 2. Fazal Sheikh, email to the author, May 25, 2019. 3. Fazal Sheikh, email to the author, June 5, 2019. 4. Cedra Wood, cedrawood.com, http://cedrawood.com/wood/bio/. 5. Andrea Zittel, zittel.org, http://www.zittel.org/work/a-z-west. 6. Richard Julin, Andrea Zittel. Lay of My Land (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2011), 54. 1.
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F R A N CES AS H FO RT H
W
ater.
The year I was born, Loren Eisley wrote The Immense Journey. His quote that holds the broad thought on how I feel about water is simple: “If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” I have taken these words with me wherever I go to study land and water. Whether on a wild river or along an arid trace where water once flowed, both experiences hold equal “magic” for me. Water can be both reflectively calm and terrifyingly powerful, water nourishes us in its abundance and depletes us in its scarcity. Simply put, water is essential to the balance of all life. My work depicts memories of places I have studied, of the edges of habitats where water meets land, of the weather and the water cycle in climates both arid and moist. Whether drawing outside or mixing ink in the print studio, my memories are my compositions, a personal flip book of my time spent observing the land. For me to be truly authentic, I must take the time to study the land through my art and diligently read the words of those who have written about it. My work depicts my time spent in the northern corners of the interior Great Basin on two very different but equally unique rivers that feed into this remarkable landscape.
Frances Ashforth Bear River 1 and Bear River 2, 2018, Akua and Charbonel ink on Arches 88, courtesy the artist
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The Ana River, in the northwest corner of the Great Basin, meanders alongside Winter Ridge and the Fremont National Forest in what’s coined as the Oregon Outback. The Ana is a humble, 7-mile-long spring-fed river that flows south into Summer Lake, Oregon. To utilize the flow, a reservoir was created at its source for irrigation and local drinking water for a population of just under 500, over vast ranchland territory. The Ana flows south through a series of small canyons before it opens up into wide marshes and spring-fed ponds that are crucial for migratory birds and numerous
mammals. By the time the Ana reaches shallow Summer Lake, it spreads out and only helps to fill the lake in late winter and spring, or during an epic rainstorm; generally by summer it evaporates into the dry lakebed. The Ana River provides the only riparian habitat in this large basin and range high-desert valley. The canyon banks show evidence of visible geology, with ash layers dating back to Mount Mazama, various earthquakes, and the Mount St. Helens eruption. The geologist I was with was in heaven; he described this riverbank as his “Rosetta Stone.� It was an enthusiastic and unforgettable geology lesson along this otherwise unremarkable dirt road. I was so fortunate to be offered two art residencies in this area, at Playa along Summer Lake. Playa invites artists, writers, and scientists to share time together in this remarkable remote setting.
Frances Ashforth, Ana River 4, 2018, Akua and Charbonel ink on Arches 88, courtesy the artist
The Bear River is in the northeast corner of the Great Basin and is 350 miles long (the largest river in North America that does not ultimately reach the sea). It flows north, then south, through northern Utah, southwest Wyoming, southeastern Idaho, and then back into Utah. Once a tributary of the Snake River, it was cut off by lava flows and diverted into the original Lake Bonneville during the Pleistocene. The lower 10 miles of the Bear River flows into the top of Great Salt Lake, and its wide braided delta is preserved as the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. Author and conservationist Terry Tempest Williams had a wonderful hand in this preserve, and her words grace the walls of the Bear River Wildlife Education Center. Her powerful book Refuge, which I have read many times, is one of the reasons I have been so drawn to these areas of Great Salt Lake, Antelope Island, and the Bear River. I have drawn, painted, and printed images of both the Ana and the Bear rivers. I am fascinated by the geology, the interior drainage basins (endorheic), evaporation, hydrology and water cycles, and the climate of both wind and weather in this vast landscape. Both rivers play crucial roles in bird migration, offer unique wetland habitat for wildlife, and provide an oasis of resources for both sparsely and densely populated communities.
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EM M E T GOWIN
Emmet Gowin, Yucca Flat, Looking West toward the Yucca Fault, Area 10, Nevada Test Site, 1996, gelatin silver print, © Emmet and Edith Gowin, courtesy Pace/ MacGill Gallery, New York
P
hilip Brookman: The trajectory in your work goes from looking at your world close up—your family, the kids, the house, all very personal— to looking at the world from far away, from an airplane looking down at the Hanford nuclear site for example. What is the connection between the personal album and the more distanced picture? Both allow us to see ourselves in a different way.
Emmet Gowin: I don’t see anything that I don’t see through a high degree of emotional connectedness. This is true of the family or my aerial photographs. When I got to a place like Hanford, Washington, for the first time, I go reluctantly. In 1986, I went to Mount St. Helens—I thought it would be my last visit—and couldn’t do some of what I wanted because of a big storm that sat over the mountain. Almost in self-defense I thought, “I’ll go over and look at Hanford. It certainly can’t hurt me to find out what it’s really like.” I was apprehensive about flying over a space that seemed like it should be restricted or important to national defense. I was amazed how easy it was to get an airplane and go. Looking at the landscape below, I sensed that something dramatic in the nation’s history had happened there. Of course I now understand that the triggers to the atomic bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been made there. But even then, the most recognizable feature was the ghost of a city, the old Hanford city site where approximately 30,000 people had lived and worked. It looked like it had been removed by a neutron bomb; nothing left but the ground plan and the sturdiest of a few buildings. And there was the Columbia River in all its glory and beauty, turning, on its way to the sea, something it had been doing for millions of years. At the same moment, the sunlight on the grasses was so beautiful that I came home with an absolutely churned sense of conflict over how beautiful this landscape felt, while so undeniably terrible; how forgiving the sunlight is to all the things that have happened there. It was a strange, powerful feeling. I felt I could never be the same. PB: Did you have to have a certain distance from that place to see and understand it? EG: No, I think I understood it in the airplane. I could see it in the light as the light touched the ground. I told myself that this is probably one of the most poisoned places in the world. How can it be beautiful? It was as if the light didn’t care and the sun didn’t think. PB: A lot of the photographs you make from the air rely on that kind of tension between beauty and the devastation that’s happened on the ground. Does that feeling of tension come from your first examination of the Hanford site? EG: I think our fascination for what is terrible is great. Our need for beauty is great. It’s not just willfulness on my part that causes those things to coexist in the same world. There is a tension formed between something that’s taken
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hundreds of millions of years to create and the degree to which it can be destroyed in just a matter of moments, days, or decades. You can’t think in a trivial way about these relationships. And oddly, instead of wanting to run away from what is granted a terrible thing to know, I wanted to know more and to hold it as an image. I then make a print to bring out as much beauty as I possibly can, because something in me still has a huge degree of respect for what it is and at the same time for what it once was. Forgive me if I have labored to make it illusive, or difficult to understand, but I believe that difficult images bring us all closer to a shared experience.
Emmet Gowin, Frenchman Flat, Looking Southeast, Nevada Test Site, 1996, gelatin silver print, © Emmet and Edith Gowin, courtesy Pace/ MacGill Gallery, New York
Excerpt from Philip Brookman, “Keys Are Stronger than the Doors They Open: A Dialogue with Emmet Gowin,” in Jock Reynolds, Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth, exh. cat. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 2002.
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L AU R A McPH EE
Laura McPhee, Blooming Tamarisk (in the town where my great-grandmother died), Goldfield, Nevada, 2015, archival pigment print, courtesy the artist and Gail Severn Gallery, Ketchum, Idaho
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I
magine, as if from above, high mountains capped with glaciers rising in snaking parallel ranges from a shallow blue lake. Let thousands of years elapse in your mind and envision early people weaving Canvasback duck decoys from bulrush and fishing for Lahontan cutthroat in the warming waters at the foot of the same eroding mountains. Fast-forward a few centuries and you might picture European settlers crossing a more desolate landscape where the mountains persist but the bottom of the lake is exposed—white and dry. If, just now, your feet touched ground, you would be standing in the heart of the 220,000 square miles of the West that is known as the Great Basin. When the wind blows, twisters of dust spin across alkali flats. Water, if it can be found, is often poisoned or bitter, as advisory place names suggest—Bitter Springs, Poison Creek. Place names derived from Shoshone, such as Tonopah or Pahrump, also speak to the presence of water. For every being, thirst is an existential threat. People with shovels and pickaxes followed the first Europeans. Communities formed around the intention of extracting what can be taken from the earth. Goldfield and Silver King, Coaldale and Eureka were founded so people might pursue treasure in greater comfort and numbers. The railroads arrived, bringing supplies and taking the spoils elsewhere. The Great Basin, really a series of basins that drain internally and have no outlet to the sea, was as hectic with human endeavor as it would ever
seem. Most settlers came from the East, as my husband’s family did in the 1870s, settling in the Ruby Valley of Nevada, almost dead center of the Great Basin. If you look for his family on microfiche at libraries throughout the Great Basin, you find them in profusion. Stories in the White Pine News, the Elko Weekly Independent, and The Ely Mining Expositor describe places like Telegraph Canyon near Cherry Creek, where one of his male forebears experienced near death at the hands of armed highwaymen. The narratives are filled with “knights of the road,” “piteous calls for water,” and demands to “dig up.” Gunshot wounds, desperadoes, saloons, stagecoaches, posses, and highwaymen are all cited with the frequency that recall John Ford westerns. In Ely, White Pine County’s capital, we find abundant records of marriages, deaths and births, and properties bought and sold by his ancestors for their summer range—houses and ranches and sheep and cows and horses. Every entry in the register books was written with fountain pen in the elaborate cursive of a series of county clerks, the professional longevity of each preserved in script. My husband’s family appears in almost every register from the 1870s to the end of the Second World War, when his kin abandoned ranching. My great grandmother, too, was said to have owned property in Ely at about that time, but we cannot find her name in the register. A woman alone with two daughters, her story unfolded on ranches and in small towns, where she worked as an itinerant schoolteacher pressing learning on the children of miners and ranchers and merchants. When we stop at the school office searching for records of her service, the current clerk asks if we are there
Laura McPhee, Promontory Point, Utah, 2018, archival pigment print, courtesy the artist and Gail Severn Gallery, Ketchum, Idaho
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Laura McPhee, Ward Charcoal Kilns, Ely, Nevada, 2018, archival pigment print, courtesy the artist and Gail Severn Gallery, Ketchum, Idaho
because she was a downwinder. She was gone by then; nuclear testing in the Great Basin started after her time. The first waves of miners extracted what they could from the desert with relative ease, claiming what lay near the surface, each man for himself. Later miners, working for corporations headquartered in places like Los Angeles or New York, made immense holes in the earth, digging with gargantuan machines, as many tons of rock were moved to find an ounce of gold, silver, copper, tungsten, lithium, or lead. Ore, often lying below the water table, requires chemicals such as cyanide and mercury mixed with millions of gallons of water to aid extraction. Unseen but detectable, these pollutants, along with byproducts like sulfuric acid, travel with the weather across the landscape; they also seep into groundwater. Promises to treat the water in perpetuity is all that is required of companies that come and often go bankrupt within a matter of years. A pipeline to take fresh water from rural places to population centers like Las Vegas has been on the table for over a decade. Plans to export 27 million gallons of water a day will render the eastern Great Basin thirstier, particularly as climate change brings temperature rise of as much as 9 degrees. Cheatgrass, a 19thcentury import from Europe, is the dominant plant species on more than 25 million acres of public land in the Great Basin. Effectively dominating (and thus eliminating) its native neighbors by using available water in early spring, it dries early too and is inclined to ignite, contributing to massive wildfires in the region. The following spring, more cheatgrass emerges as its seeds resist the ravages of fire. As in most of America, human dramas have moved to cities, and the Great Basin is perceived primarily as the big empty: a series of deserts intersected by highways, a necklace of mines, a handful of prisons, a site of nuclear tests more numerous than we like to remember, a darkness at night and a brightness by day unparalleled in most other regions on earth. For humans accustomed to the company of others and a surfeit of electric light, this is perhaps off-putting. Generally, travelers in the Great Basin do
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not know that they are in the Great Basin. In the main, they are only glancingly aware of American pronghorn on great migrations, of sage grouse strutting in their leks, of mule deer or mountain lions, or kangaroo rats or longnose leopard lizards, Mormon crickets or magpies. They almost surely miss, too, male tarantulas setting forth on long journeys to find a mate, often traveling many miles to approach a female whose reaction to courtship varies from receptivity to cannibalism. Underlying its indelible and often tragic human stories, the Great Basin’s hot and cold deserts, its hidden creeks and ephemeral saline lakes, its glacial valleys and inland marshes, peat bogs and alkali playas—that is to say, its surface geology—is enhanced for this photographer by the simple fact that in huge expanses of this predominantly public land, most everything is there for the looking, laid bare by the wind and arid climate. The reward for wandering slowly, for stopping often, for close looking as the evening gathers and the trains and the mountainsides are illuminated in copper and gold, is the sensation that time is visible — that you can hold it in your hand.
Laura McPhee, Sparklers, Spiral Jetty, Gunnison Bay, Great Salt Lake, Box Elder County, Utah, 2004, archival pigment print, courtesy the artist and Gail Severn Gallery, Ketchum, Idaho
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FA Z A L S H EIK H
Fazal Sheikh, 40°46’11”N / 113°10’46”W, World War II precision bombing target, October 14, 2017, pigment print, © Fazal Sheikh, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York
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W
e live in a hard and cracked world,” writes the poet Robert Lowell. Nowhere is this more evident than in America’s Red Rock Wilderness situated in southern Utah. This tract you hold in your hands is a celebration of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments and a warning. On April 26, 2017, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order calling for a review of 27 national monuments. He had two criteria: they had to have been established between 1996 and 2016, and be over 100,000 acres. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke was asked by the President to study the monuments, then make his recommendations. Out of the 27 monuments under review, Zinke advocated shrinking 6 national monuments. Two of those monuments are in Utah. Word out of Washington, D.C. suggests Bears Ears may be gutted by 80 percent with Grand Staircase-Escalante being cut in half, leaving fragile desert lands vulnerable to development. Utah’s record of exploiting our public lands from uranium and coal mining, to drilling for oil and gas, to the destruction of desert ecosystems by off-road vehicles, is a long and troubled history. We felt it was important to show what the future of these protected lands could be when monument status is lifted. This is a collaborative embrace born out of love and resistance by two American citizens, a photographer and a writer, created in the name of community. Fazal Sheikh and Terry Tempest Williams, November 26, 2017, introduction to their collaborative project, Exposure.
Fazal Sheikh, notes on photographs from The Exposure Trilogy (Vol. 1): 40°54’6”N / 112°32’4”W October 7, 2017 Shoreline of Great Salt Lake, north of the Southern Pacific Railroad causeway. Constructed in 1959, the causeway bisected the lake, increasing the salt concentration in the northern portion of the lake to nearly ten times the levels found in oceans. As the level of salinity approaches saturation, the conditions support few life forms, with the exception of a microbe known as archaea, the cells of which contain the carotenoids that create the pink hue in the lake and along the shoreline.
Fazal Sheikh, 40°54’6”N / 112°32’4”W, Shoreline of the Great Salt Lake, October 7, 2017, pigment print, © Fazal Sheikh, courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York
40°46’11”N / 113°10’46”W October 14, 2017 World War II precision bombing target. Active between 1942 and 1945, bombing ranges were constructed throughout the desert for aerial missions, many of which consisted of dropping sand-filled and 100-pound concrete bombs, each fitted with a minor charge to enable flight crews to gauge the accuracy of their practice mission. More elaborate targets in the Roswell Army Air Field to the southeast frequently included swastikas superimposed upon the targets. With the passage of time, the trace of many such targets has been erased by natural erosion.
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CED R A WOO D
F
or much of my Great Basin road trip, I was joined by an invisible nonhuman presence. It turned out not to be a ghost—despite the constant shifting and rustling that kept me awake while I curled up in my car’s backseat—but a mouse. Several mice, to be exact. I released a massive gray rodent picked up in the Sheldon Antelope Refuge; a golden beast with a tasseled tail, after camping in Death Valley; a tiny shivering sliver of a thing before leaving the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest. Whether it was the unrelieved sense of sharing a space with beings I couldn’t see, or the sleep deprivation, or the solitude, I couldn’t say; but the trip become more surreal for me as it went on. There is a genre of fairy story in which a woman is supernaturally kidnapped and brought to a magnificent house to nurse an infant. Through some mischance, a magical substance is rubbed into one of her eyes, and she’s suddenly able to see where she truly is. One eye still sees the castle and the beautiful babe, but the supernatural glamour falls away from the other, revealing a wretched cave, an inhuman spawn in her arms.
Cedra Wood, Accumulated Matter (Salton Sea Shore), 2019, acrylic on panel, courtesy the artist
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This idea of the one disenchanted and one enchanted eye haunts me, especially in the expansive territories of the Great Basin. A thriving desert town always conjures up two simultaneous, parallel visions. Through one eye, the prosperous homes, businesses, and lights; through the other, the same site after a century of abandonment: toppling walls, shreds of faded fabric, piles of rust and sand.
The Salton Sea, most recently filled through a 1905 engineering mishap, demands to be seen this way, with its history and future superimposed. You hold in your mind the fact that native Torres-Martinez communities were catastrophically flooded here, reducing the tribe’s lands by half—and the brief memory of the American Riviera, flitting with the ghosts of frolicking beachgoers—and the ankle-deep piles of barnacles and tilapia bones that comprise the current, ominously retreating shoreline—and the wind-whipped pesticide storms that may one day rise out of the evaporated lakebed.
Cedra Wood, Pine Cone Shroud (Sagehen Creek Experimental Forest, Sierra Nevada), 2019, acrylic on panel, courtesy the artist
The small sculptures that serve as references for the painting Slow Growth are made largely of lint—material harvested during this year’s Lint Cleaning and Restoration Camp at Great Basin National Park’s Lehman Caves. As one eye helped me collect the hair, clothing fibers, and skin cells from speleothems, the other resurrected the tens of thousands of visitors from all over the world who had left these small pieces of themselves behind. The heavily timbered and replanted forests of the eastern Sierra Nevada are slowly regaining a sense of wilderness, which I tried to embody in Pine Cone Shroud. An ineffably beautiful building designed by Richard K. A. Kletting, taken down by fires and winds nearly a century ago, leaves its phantom hanging in the air in Afterimage of Saltair I (Great Salt Lake). These, and the other paintings and props I made for this exhibition, represent my first attempt to communicate a persistent and haunted double vision. I hope that they will make the viewer look twice—and sometimes, twice at the same time.
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ANDREA ZIT T EL
A
ndrea: To some extent I feel that I have been hard-wired for this environment. I used to think that I would one day live on one of the family farms. Though going to art school and living in New York for a few years sort of changed things. Richard: Did you always know that you’d end up in the desert? Even when you were in New York? Andrea: Yes. I knew I would end up in the desert living a somewhat experimental life, more than I knew I would end up being an artist. … Richard: In your book “Diary #1” you talk about starting to search for land in this area in the 90s. Andrea: Let’s see. I started looking for land in 1999, but I’ve been coming here since 1986. And I came here in the early 90s a few times with Allan McCollum (an American artist) on road trips. We had this fantasy that we would buy a big building (because there’s always a problem for artists with art storage), and that we would make a museum that was a roadside attraction where all of our stored works would also be on view. We would charge people a dollar or two admission and provide a good iced tea stand or cafeteria. … Richard: I want to bring up the idea of your life and practice as performance in relationship to this house and the fact that it’s a public artwork that you live in. Andrea: There’s a lecture that I’ve started giving recently that centers on the idea of experience. One thing that I can talk about is how I wanted to create works as a lived experience for both myself and for others, in part because I thought that would make it more real. What happened though, was that once my life became really public, it actually started to feel less real. … Overall I’ve been careful to make sure that everything in my life is grounded in an authentic experience; that it isn’t merely created as an image or to represent an idea of something else. Richard: I like how you say that you create your work as a lived experience for you and for others. Andrea: By extension I like to think that A–Z West will one day become a site of experience-based learning: an Institute of Investigative Living. I believe that you learn things about the world by having experiences, not by being told things. That’s how I want my work to function too. … Richard: I wanted to talk about the whole exhibition and the different works. Andrea: The first space will have the “Wall Sprawls,” which are created using satellite images of land that’s on the edge of an uninhabited wilderness and just starting to be developed. They are important to the show because they establish the cultural context of the Southwest, and not just a romantic notion of the desert that people seem to have. In real-
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ity the desert is a very complex and politicized space. It’s being rapidly developed for its resources; also the military owns and uses a huge part of the Southwest; and it contains the fastest growing population in the United States, which I can’t quite figure out. Why is everyone moving to Phoenix and Las Vegas? … Richard: The “Wall Sprawls” have a certain pattern.
Andrea Zittel, Prototype for Billboard at A–Z West: Body in Space with Object #1, 2011, AC plywood, Polyurethane, matte acrylic paint, © Andrea Zittel, courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles
Andrea: They repeat themselves infinitely. When I was growing up in southern California, there were only two houses in our entire area. By the time I was in high school, my neighborhood had developed into suburbia, complete with a massive shopping mall. I’ve always thought of growth as a kind of virus that replicates itself and takes over everything. Repeating the pattern of the “Wall Sprawls” —tiling and mirroring—gets at that idea of an infinite sprawl. Richard: And then in the exhibition, we shall encounter the new piece “Lay of My Land.” Andrea: Which is the macro version of sprawl, when you think about it. Because the “Wall Sprawl” is dealing with a landscape being turned into individual increments of privatized land. And “Lay of My Land” represents the six five- and ten- acre parcels that I’ve slowly accumulated over time, and put together and turned into A–Z West. I’ve been continuously buying parcels until I finally created something that resembles a section of the desert. Excerpt from a conversation between Richard Julin and Andrea Zittel, reprinted from: Richard Julin, Andrea Zittel. Lay of My Land. © 2011 Prestel Verlag, Munich, a member of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH
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PA RTICIPATIN G A RTISTS A N D ES SAYIST Frances Ashforth (b. 1957) received a BS in fine art from Skidmore College, with a focus on printmaking and drawing, and studied printmaking at the Sir John Cass School of Art in London. She has exhibited her work at museums and galleries including the International Print Center New York, New York City; the Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, New York; the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, Connecticut; McMaster Museum of Art, Ontario; and The Print Center of Philadelphia, among others. Ashforth’s work is represented in numerous public and private collections, and she has held several residencies, including two at Playa in Summer Lake, Oregon, and one at Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. Jenny Emery Davidson (b. 1972) works as the executive director of The Community Library in Ketchum. She grew up in Twin Falls, Idaho, earned a bachelor’s degree in English at Carleton College in Minnesota, completed her doctorate degree in American studies at the University of Utah, and then returned to her home state to live. Prior to her position at The Community Library, she worked in journalism and as an English instructor and administrator for the College of Southern Idaho. She served a six-month Fulbright fellowship in Guanajuato, Mexico, in 2010. Emmet Gowin (b. 1941) received a BFA in graphic design from the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) and an MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. For more than four decades, Gowin’s work has been included exhibitions around the world, including solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Gowin taught in the Visual Arts program at Princeton University from 1973 to 2010. Gowin’s work is represented in collections that include those of
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the Art Institute of Chicago; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Maison Européene de la Photographie, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Tokyo Museum of Art; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. His work has been the subject of six monographs, with a seventh due to appear in 2019. Nancy Holt (1938–2014) graduated from Tufts University with an undergraduate degree in biology. During her long career, she executed numerous earthworks, public sculptures, installations, film, video and audio projects, as well as photography and concrete poetry. In addition to Sun Tunnels (1973–1976), she is well known for Dark Star Park (1970–1984, Arlington County, Virginia), and other sculptures installed in Europe and North America. Her work is represented in major collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Utah Museum of Fine Arts, and Museum für Gegenswartskunst, Siegen, Germany, and works are permanently installed at the University of South Florida, Tampa; the University of M assachusetts, Dartmouth; and the Miami University Art Museum, Ohio. From 2010 to 2012, a retrospective exhibition, Nancy Holt: Sightlines, traveled throughout the United States and Europe. Laura McPhee (b. 1958) earned her BA from Princeton University and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has exhibited her work around the world, including the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; the J. Paul Getty Center & Museum, Los A ngeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. McPhee’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the J. Paul Getty Center Museum, Los Angeles; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York;
the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She is currently a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
yoming; The Arctic Circle Expedition, W Longyearbyen, Svalbard; and the Eden Project, Australian National University Field Studies Program.
Fazal Sheikh (b. 1965) earned a BA from Princeton University. His work has appeared in exhibitions internationally at institutions including Tate Modern, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the International Center of Photography and the United Nations, New York City; the Henri CartierBresson Foundation, Paris; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow. His work is held by many public collections, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, New York City; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Andrea Zittel (b. 1965) earned a BFA in painting and sculpture from San Diego State University and an MFA in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has appeared in exhibitions at institutions including the Palm Springs Art Museum, California; the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Vancouver Art Gallery, British Columbia, Canada; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among many others. Additionally, she has been the subject of several monographic books and a segment of the PBS series Art.21.
Robert Smithson (1938–1973) studied for two years at the Art Students League in New York City. He is best known for his earthworks Spiral Jetty (1970), Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971), and Amarillo Ramp (1973). His work is represented in numerous public collections, including those of the Art Institute of Chicago; Dia Art Foundation; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Cedra Wood (b. 1982) received a BA from Austin College and an MFA from the University of New Mexico. She has exhibited her work at museums across the United States, including the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; West Virginia Museum, Morgantown; the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, New Mexico; SITE Santa Fe; and the University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque. Wood has held artist residencies at institutions around the world, including the Arctic Institute of North America in the Yukon Territory, Canada; Ucross Foundation,
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Boise
Sun Valley
BOA R D & STA F F
Sun Valley Center for the Arts Board of Directors Linda Bowling Kelly Corroon Amber Busuttil Mullen Adam Elias Kay Hardy Caroline Hobbs Andie Laporte Barbara Lehman Russell Notides Wendy Pesky Jim Reid Katherine Rixon, President Lisa Stelck, Vice President Ellen Gillespie, Secretary Linda Nicholson, Treasurer Advisory Council Kathy Abelson Ruth Bloom Gary Borman Michael Engl Marybeth Flower Drew Gibson Philip Isles Glenn Janss Carol Nie Van Gordon Sauter Roselyne Swig Patricia Wilson Jeri Wolfson
At the Sun Valley Center for the Arts we want you to think, we want you to wonder, we want you to create, to find inspiration, to expand your view and push your boundaries. In short, we want you to learn no matter what your age. We want you to start a conversation. That’s why we are here.
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Sun Valley Center for the Arts
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