Dispersal/Return, by Jorie Emory contd.

Jeannette Hart-Mann and Nina Dubois's Culture Digest(e)

Notably, these pedagogical goals create a perceivable peer community within Land Arts of the American West alumni, whereby some common aesthetic or conceptual grounds have developed, as evidenced in the Land Arts of the American West archive and in Dispersal/Return. Having said that, the works in Dispersal/Return are diverse in their media, message, and methods; a testament to each artist’s own journeys during Land Arts and thereafter.

Considering that artists have long been investigating and responding to the landscape, a critical understanding of Land Arts’ historical context is essential. The works in Dispersal/Return demonstrate that today’s artists continue to wrestle with many of the same issues as artists of the 1960s and 1970s. While Land Arts and Earthworks have historically been a vehicle for moving art out of museums and galleries and into the landscape, land-based artists still contend with the interplay of site (landscape) and nonsite (gallery). At the core of this issue, artists continually problematize the exhibition, object-ness, and the dissemination of research and data. In Culture Digest(e), Jeannette Hart-Mann and Nina Dubois engage a dialectical relationship of material and process in their construction of a composting “art-laboratory” shed outside the museum and corresponding digital still-life photos of composting material in the museum exhibition. To participate in the artists’ tour of their outdoor installation is both an informative lesson in campus food policy and an appeal to reconsider food waste for its aesthetic potential. In the museum, Dubois’ digital slideshow of still-life photos reconnect the viewer to the outdoor installation and evolving compost process.

Erika Osborne's 2749 Years for Matchsticks

Bill Gilbert suggests that the new tools for analysis of contemporary Land Art practice might deal more with land use than landscape. In 2749 Years for Matchsticks, Erika Osborne’s carefully represented old growth tree ring reveals a striking tension within our industrial use of natural resources and the desire to preserve those things which have more than economic value. In addition to reconsidering land use, viewers are confronted with land (re)apportioning, as in Jeff Beekman’s Cauterized Globe. The trauma and healing involved in cauterization is a powerful context within which to view a common globe, creating a perspective surprisingly full of hope for political renewal.

Jeff Beekman’s Cauterized Globe

In addition to grappling the site/nonsite and close consideration of land use, the works in Dispersal/Return encompass other emerging themes in contemporary land arts, including: multidisciplinary collaboration, engaging the audience, creating interactive work, creating dialogue, community participation, and gift-giving. In Jen Van Horn’s interactive piece, Bread and Jam, viewers participate in ritualized eating and cleansing in a domestic museum installation. Significantly, the interactions between artist and viewers during the performance recontextualize the ideas surrounding appropriate eating and cleansing places and audience, and recreate the Land Arts experience of communal washing after a meal.

Jen Van Horn’s Bread and Jam

Dispersal/Return has provided the occasion to look around and understand the context of contemporary and Southwest Land Arts through the work of recent MFA graduates by inviting the community to participate in creating, entering a dialogue, traveling alongside, and venturing out on one’s own adventure. - Jorie Emory

read smudge's LAND/ART blog post on the Dispersal Return exhibition

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