Desert Gestures

A series of solo performances in Joshua Tree National Park, photographed with a large format camera. The primary audience is the land itself; the photographs are artifacts of gestural tableaux with the desert. I was recovering from a surgery when these were made. Bowing to the desert in a velvet bathrobe—as a ceremonial robe—felt just right. The winter desert was welcoming and otherworldly. The gestures were lighthearted rituals of recovery. Turning to the land in this way, witnessed by interspecies kin, is an impulse I often return to when my body is healing. This was a pilgrimage to a desert landscape very different than my own home in upstate New York. These type of self-healing performances are a good way to shock the system out of a trauma loop. It’s like being your own rodeo clown, but the angry bull happens to also be your own body.

The gestures range in tone and action: reaching, contraction, surrender. Bouquets of eucalyptus, grocery store plastic bags filled with fruit, and my salt sculptures are material accomplices of the mundane world in these tableaux. Just the sound of wind blew across the sandstone, otherwise placid silence, soothing and serene.

Top, left: Cholla Bag with Toe Hole Stocking, 2018. Archival inkjet print. 32” x 40”. Collection of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, SUNY New Paltz, NY