Nevada Temptation

The first issue of the Silverland Almanac has a short essay called Art: West, by Jennifer Bethke. Here's a brief quote:

As Europeans began arriving in North America, they encountered a place that seemed to them empty and untouched, and as such entirely devoid of history. In the 1700 and 1800s, this condition was an ongoing source of anxiety, as America tried to establish a sense of culture and nationhood. But when it came to the West, this misconception that the land was virgin, unwritten, and totally without historical associations, was often turned into a liberating, positive value: the West appeared to be the proverbial blank slate, onto which all sorts of desires could be written.

Becca was taken by this essay, and it was a short jump from the blank slate hungry for written desires, to the historical romance novels set in the West. On the covers, those transcribed desires vault the written word and go directly for the oilpaint eyeball splash, slapping torrid torsos and heaving cleavages directly onto the purple mountains majesty.



It's funny but not altogether inappropriate that Becca, a Vermont transplant, is finally coming to terms with the wide expansive Nevada skies through thriftstore reconnaissance. She's screwed several romance novels to the walls, secured either like taxidermy or windowshopper eyecandy behind plates of plexiglass, in the stairwell at David Hall. She had to point out to me that she paired the books together in such a way that the landscapes are continuous between the paired books. This doesn't seem to have been a plan -- the books have different cover artists -- it's more likely that those backgrounds share a kind of shorthand lingua franca, whose syllables are composed of waterfalls, treelines, and lakeshores, as inevitable in their appearance as snow on Mount Rose.




I like the idea that, if you were patient enough in your thriftstore excavations, you could probably form one endlessly continuous landscape, bridging dozens of books in a 360-degree panorama, a circular terrain populated by a crowd of couples, each so focused in their particular ecstacy, they remain oblivious to the half-naked pioneer damsels and renegade Indians just a few paces to their left.

Becca's written a bit about the romance novels on her blog.

Curtains For You

For the New Genres class, Becca had people follow a path through the woods behind the art building, reading notes that had been tacked to trees, as sort of markers on the path. Or creators of the path.

She had people walk along the path a slight distance from each other, so everyone could have a kind of "private" stroll through the words. The etiquette was a little weird and provisional. I was behind Russell and I kept slowing down, because I didn't want to intrude on his space.

And then the person behind me (I won't name names) actually lagged a bit too far behind, because he lost the thread of the path, and ended up taking a shortcut around the last few sentences.

These pics are somewhat out of order, and very incomplete. To piece the words together into a coherent thought, you'll have to venture into the woods yourself. I doubt the papers will be there for long; I have a feeling Becca won't want her work to turn into litter. Though the idea of the papers being left, and the sentences decomposing via the whims of rain and wind, is somewhat appealing.

But even if the papers are gone, it's a nice walk. I haven't done much exploring back there, so I saw a few things that were new to me -- between one piece of a sentence and the next, sometimes finding an interpolated backyard.

At the end of the path, there were closed curtains. Some curls of smoke wafted up from behind them. When everyone arrived, the curtains were parted, and a brief performance took place. I didn't have a camera with me at the time, so I have no visual record of the performance itself. I'm in the mood to just leave it at that.

And here, after the audience was gone, is the view from the stage.

Becca's Neanderthal's Monsters

Becca Jane recently posted up a stop-motion animation on her blog -- here it is:



It gave me flashes of both Martha Colburn (who I had the pleasure of meeting at the Ottawa Animation Festival many moons ago) and Ladislas Starevich.