Continuing my series of installations referencing how we humans attempt to direct where water flows…
I recently read Beaverland by Leila Philip, and understand that as much as we humans try to control water with our concrete dams, canals, culverts, etc., we will never come close to the effectiveness with which beavers manage water for the benefit of all creatures.
We humans think we can manage the forces of nature, and to some extent we succeed. We try to direct water where we want it to flow, and throughout the U.S. in geographies with lots of water and those with little, the attempts are similar.
This image is one from a series I installed at this location, continuing my installations across the U.S. using these objects I created in my studio with upcycled materials. I’ve used these same objects in a variety of locations across the land, referencing our human attempts to direct water.
We humans think we can manage the forces of nature, and to some extent we succeed. We try to direct water where we want it to flow, and throughout the U.S. in geographies with lots of water and those with little, the attempts are similar.
This image is one from a series I installed at this location, the first installation using these objects I created in my studio with upcycled materials. I’ve since used these same objects in a variety of locations across the land, referencing our human attempts to direct water.
There are always consequences.
Intense light, intense heat, intense shadows.
Loops and lines. Drawing in space and time.
I create the majority of my installation series on public lands, often on those managed by the National Park Service (like this installation) or the Bureau of Land Management, sometimes on lands managed by the state or city I’m in. I greatly appreciate that all of us can wander along paths on these parcels of the earth, sometimes off the path if permitted, and enjoy this incredible planet we inhabit.
It often takes me a long time to get to the point where I feel like sharing the images from an installation. I like to ponder and reflect on my memory of the experience before releasing it into the world, and I’m rarely bound by the calendar to do so. While exhibits and applications require listing the year I created a piece for information, it’s a bit of a challenge to nail down that detail since it may be several years from the time I make objects to when I install them in a landscape to when I share the final image. I like to view time more as a spiral than a line.
Such is the case with this particular installation and the images of it.
Though I can’t tell you the date I took the photo unless I look at the data, I can figure out the year pretty quickly if I think about it, but those bits of information aren’t important enough to me for them to be at the forefront of my memory. I do remember the season (autumn), and the weather (cool and very windy). That’s really all I want to know.
On the site of a former coal strip-mine in Illinois sits a monumental earthwork by Michael Heizer, Effigy Tumuli. I have conflicting feelings about Heizer’s land art, which has received warranted criticism, especially since he recently completed City. I understand his artistic vision with Effigy Tumuli, having read quite a bit about it, yet I think it is imperative for those of us who are not Indigenous (he and I) to refrain from drawing on cultures that are not our own.
Heizer appropriated Native American burial mounds to create Effigy Tumuli as a reclamation project back in the 1980s. It is impressive in scale and successful in restoring a more natural habitat along the Illinois River, but that does not erase the issue of appropriation. In my own work I strive to avoid incorporating traditions that are not my own, but I figure that I have probably unintentionally done so in the past. When I learn and know better, I try to do better, and will continue to do so. Course corrections are important while on a journey, as a human and as an artist, as is acknowledging ignorance and mistakes.
There’s so much I could go on about with Heizer, but that would take a book instead of a blog post, so I’ll leave that work to the expert art historians and critics. For me as an artist, my installation on top of Effigy Tumuli is layered and complex, leaving me with much to think about and question. (I’m quite okay with having unanswered questions regarding my work, for myself and for others.) I’m not sure if it was permissible to make my way to the top of the section known as the Frog (the grass was mown like a path); it did feel a bit like a small act of artistic rebellion against Heizer to be up there.
The materials for these objects hung around my studio for a long time (maybe a few years?), just waiting to signal what they were to become. They finally let me know, and just after I’d made several objects with the rusted steel and copper the WYNMWA opportunity came along. I created land installations with these objects for the film.
This particular image was such a wonderful surprise in how it reminded me of snapshots I’d taken of the hole leading into a wolf spider’s web a few summers ago. Holes have been a recurring theme in my work for nearly four decades! They just keep coming back. At the WYNMWA panel discussion, a couple of the artists talked about how life is circular and we come around to what has been before. Truth!
I was recently invited to participate in an exhibit at the Loveland Museum, entitled Artists Visage Artists, and was charged with creating a piece interpreting the work of a fellow artist. Curator Maureen Corey paired me with Jennie Kiessling to convey each other’s work through our own vision. Jennie and I have connected aesthetically and become good friends over the past several years, so I almost instantly knew the direction I wanted to go with this piece.
After spending much time immersed in images of Jennie’s work and a Zoom discussion regarding our thoughts as to what we would create, I made objects in my studio and then spent time out on a swath of Wyoming grasslands to create a series of installations. The image above is the one I chose to show in the exhibit.
This experience has been very emotional and moving for me in ways too personal to reveal at this time, but it’s also been liberating and motivating. This is my statement for the exhibit: “Through a dedicated practice in abstraction, Jennie Kiessling’s work reflects her impeccable study and masterful execution of line. Her exploration in text of the immigrant experience with her Italian family history creates a line through humanity that is specific to Jennie but resonates with many, connecting generations and cultures.”
A crystal-clear early winter day provided a joyous respite from the autumn skies filled with orange smoke from western wildfires.
When I read the email stating that art critic and author Eleanor Heartney chose this installation image to be included in Ecoconsciousness, “WOW!” and “I can’t believe it! Really?” raced through my mind. I own books written by her and so was pretty excited and honored when I received the news! (My work is on page 73 of the catalog in the exhibit link.)
In the midst of prepping for my solo exhibit Here and Gone that opened in January 2020, I had little time reflect deeply on the work that I created a few short weeks prior. I’ve now been able to do so since I took the exhibit down in early March, just before the spread of COVID 19 paused the world.
I was pleased with the series and the exhibit, and remain so, but the work now has new layers of meaning for me, especially after thinking about what others have said about it. This review of the exhibit by Jennie Kiessling that was published in Studio Wyoming Review on Wyofile dug deep into the soul of my work and captured my intent and purpose very well.
art in the middle of nowhere 