Land Arts of the American West, Various Sites (2013-2014)
Participating Artist
Land Arts of the American West is a field-based program for artists, writers, and architects interesting in investigating the intersection of human construction and the evolving nature of the planet. Our itinerary brought us six-thousand miles overland to experience major land art monuments—Double Negative, Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels, The Lightning Field—while also visiting sites to expand our understanding of what land art might be. We camped for two months witnessing pre-colonial archeology at Chaco Canyon and infrastructure at Hoover Dam, as well as military-industrial operations in the Great Salt Lake Desert and scientific exploration at the Very Large Array. We experienced remote sites like the north rim of the Grand Canyon and Gila Wilderness in addition to occupied zones such as Wendover, Utah and Marfa, Texas. As we traveled, we made our own work in the landscapes we inhabited to calibrate the expanding range of our examinations.
Selected Work:
Heat Death of the Universe (2014, video performance), exhibited at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts (LHUCA).
3000 miles from what i once called home (2014, sound installation), exhibited at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts (LHUCA).
journeyboy (2014, performance installation), exhibited at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts (LHUCA) and the 2015 Wassaic Project Summer Festival.
Meat; in case of ermegency [sic]; and Marfa, Texas, TX Biennial (online exhibition, 2013).
Rehearsing Meat at Double Negative in the Moapa Valley on Mormon Mesa near Overton, NV. Photo credit: Chris Taylor.
Creating sound scores from movement improvisations in collaboration with artist Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels in Wendover, UT. Photo credit: Chris Taylor.
(Above) Gallery view of Journeyboy at the Wassaic Project Summer Exhibition and Festival, Wassaic, NY (2015). Journeyboy was a site-specific installation which combined dance for camera shot in Beirut, Lebanon projected onto original text written at Cabinetlandia in Deming, NM. Created and performed by Jack Isaac Pryor. Video by kara lynch.
(Below) Video excerpt, Heat Death of the Universe at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, Lubbock, TX. Heat Death of the Universe was a solo performance for camera, created in and for the New Mexico desert. After Pamela Zoline’s 1967 short story, “Heat Death of the Universe.” Photo and video credit: Jack Isaac Pryor.