Systems for Embodying Landscape: Dwelling and Movement

Abstract

[NOTE: THIS PDF DOCUMENT IS DESIGNED AS A TWO-PAGE SPREAD. FOR BEST VIEWING USE ADOBE ACROBAT RATHER THAN A WEB BROWSER.]My art is conceptual and it is geographical. Specifically, I design and perform techniques that enable purposeful integration between me as an individual and landscapes with whom I choose to forge relations. In this thesis, those two landscapes are the Mojave Desert of southeastern California, and the suburbs of the Twin Cities metropolitan region. What is the subject of my quest? It is setting up scenarios, or ways of being, or what I call “systems for embodying landscapes,” so that moments emerge for both corporeal and phantasmal human-ness to exist placidly in the greater context of the unseen landscape. In this thesis I highlight two opposite sides of the same coin—a tension—that has helped define the modern age. This tension is the confusion and angst between settlement and movement. When I purposefully put my body into landscapes that are not “home-like,” there exist two basic options: maintain mobility, or figure out where, how, and why to stop. To put it simply, I have to move or I have to settle, and toggling among the various forms, scales, stresses, joys, and durations of movement and dwelling is a good way to describe the experience of performing one of my systems. In addition to creative essays, this document contains photographic documentation of my systems, as well as documentation of the gallery installations I made for an exhibit at the University of Minnesota in May 2021.