Death Valley
Death Valley revolves around a relationship that ends during a road trip through the California desert. By inserting this personal story into a body of appropriated texts, including mid-century travel guides and historical accounts of early American westward expeditions, it sets out to juxtapose the impermanence of a relationship with the timelessness of the desert: both the setting of the project and one of its characters.
The project began as a collection of journal entries written during the road trip and photographs taken with an analog camera, and was developed into a series of drawings, tracings, and temporary installations during The Wanderer Thematic Residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts.
The drawings and tracings were made using an overhead projector to collage and superimpose photographs of Death Valley from different periods and by different hands — including my own and those of Ansel Adams, whose images of the valley represent one of the most authoritative and aestheticized visions of that landscape. Projected together and traced in pencil and charcoal onto sheets of paper, the different sets of images become inseparable.
The work was exhibited in the artist's studio at the end of the residency period. My residency was supported in part by the Cliff Lede Family Charitable Foundation.
