STATEMENT OF WORK

Around 10 years ago I was driving through the Mojave Desert to the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains when I saw a canyon emerge from the vast desert horizon. Fluted red walls quickly enveloped my view; the earth lifted skyward at dynamic angles, confounding any sense of scale. A glimpse of the past, the present, and the future proposed in blurred motion volcanic rock, and then it was gone ---- in my rear view mirror. The whole metaphysical experience felt both in time and out of time.

Years later and after much change, I returned to the canyon to seek what I had felt, a deep connection to existence immersed in time. I found the camera a tool to extend these feelings into images. How Close, whose title alludes to unexplainable intimacy, is the result of over 5 years and hundreds of images made at/with the canyon.

The canyon, presently known as Red Rock Canyon, is located 125 miles north of Los Angeles. Unique landforms feature layers of red and white sediment, as well as pink and black volcanic rock deposited in an ancient inland lake that was uplifted by the still active Garlock Fault over 12 million years ago. The area is rich in fossil diversity with at least 88 species of plants and animals identified.

Many petroglyphs, sacred and cultural sites, and a large trading route remain from the Kawaiisu (Nüwa) people who lived in the area for 2000 years. In 1848, after the Mexican-American War the U.S. Federal Government began establishing new western territories. Although the war treaty acknowledged the Kawaiisu (Nüwa) peoples’ original Spanish land grant, they were forced to cede most of their land through U.S. government manipulation and signed Treaty D, which again guaranteed the right to live on ancestral lands (albeit smaller portion) but the treaty was unknowingly never ratified. When European American settlers came to the area during the gold rush of the 1850s they murdered or forcibly removed the Kawaiisu (Nüwa) people, claiming the land theirs.

For the next 70 years human exploitation of the land’s mineral content boomed. Many camps and mines can be found throughout the canyon as well as stage coach and freight stops. In the early 1900s, after most mines were abandoned, the land’s beginnings as a tourist attraction was established by homesteader Rudolf Bart Hagen. It is also around this time that an annual Easter service was held in the canyon and is still held there to this day.

Since the 1920s the motion picture industry has used the canyon as a backdrop for mainly re-creating the image of the “wild west” in countless western films and then during the mid-century Space Age as an “on location” extraterrestrial site in science fiction films. Various cinematic representations include: Arizona territory during an Apache attack in 1880, a lunar landscape inhabited by Gumby shaped rock creatures in 1958, a destroyed Martian civilization in 1950, desert cliffs above the ruins of New York City in 3955, the robot resort Westworld in 1983, and the wilderness of Shur east of Egypt c. 1446 BC.

After the State of California acquired the Hagen property in 1969, and later acquisitions of original gold claims from 1893, depression era parcels of the 1930s, and post World War II “desert craze” parcels, the canyon was classified in 1973 as a California State Park and exists presently for recreation and preservation.

Being at the canyon and knowing this history is complicated. I acknowledge my own white, European American ancestry in relationship to this place. How in this context my camera is an imperial weapon akin to a late nineteenth century survey photographers’ camera, documenting western territories on behalf of the U.S. War Department. I see all of the racist imagery made at the canyon by the motion picture industry in service of a white supremacist narrative and question my desire to add to such a disgraceful archive. My decision to create this project is informed by reflection on and critical engagement with these legacies of oppression.

The canyon’s timelessness confounds as does its image and its reality. Using visual allegory spanning three chapters, the photographs in How Close describe a transformational intimacy with the canyon’s metaphysics while aiming to, as American philosopher and literary critic Fredric Jameson writes, “demfamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present.”