Fantasizing about road trips is starting to move closer and closer to actually planning road trips. Here’s a possibility, a visit to the Desert X exhibition to coincide with California desert wildflower bloom.
From Desert X’s website: “For Nicholas Galanin, a Tlingit and Unangax̂ artist and musician, memory and land are inevitably entwined. The 45-foot letters of Never Forget reference the Hollywood sign, which initially spelled out HOLLYWOODLAND and was erected to promote a whites-only development. Its timing coincided with a development in Palm Springs that also connected to the film industry: Studio contracts limited actors’ travel, contributing to the city’s rise as playground and refuge of the stars. Meanwhile, the white settler mythology of America as the land of the free, home of the brave was promoted in the West, and the landscape was cinematized through the same lens. Never Forget asks settler landowners to participate in the work by transferring land titles and management to local Indigenous communities. The work is a call to action and a reminder that land acknowledgments become only performative when they do not explicitly support the land back movement. Not only does the work transmit a shockwave of historical correction, but also promises to do so globally through social media.”
Having spent over a year preoccupied with boundaries and measurable distances, it’s such a comfort to be reminded that somewhere out there is a world without walls…
This is soooooooooooooo tempting. I can’t wait to get back to the desert!
I’m with Gerhard. Having spent so much time in the desert as a child and then living in the high desert of Arizona canyonlands for a few years as an adult, Mitches photos sure beckon me back.