Some serious business: abiquiu residency

From top: C-Prints, gifs, graphite on paper, video with audio sourced from contact microphone recordings, 2018-19. This series is documentation from my residency in Abiquiu facilitated by Some Serious Business.

This project was in response to the trans-historical landscape of northern New Mexico, with a particular focus on the rock formations of Plaza Blanca, the cave dwellings of Mesa Verde, and the petroglyphs located around Abiquiu. The documentation of landscape in painting and writing have been primary western methods of expressing the connections between people and land, as with Gustave Courbet’s The Stone Breakers or Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. However, during European conquest of the southwest, the displacement and excavation of North America’s Indigenous population has created a historic rupture that has illegally removed the original inhabitants of the land, leaving only remnants and ruins for academic analysis. The landscape of Northern New Mexico is patterned with cliff dwellings, empty foundations, and petroglyphs, all of which recall past inhabitants and cultures and suggest a narrativized, cultural landscape. Landforms and rock formations were used to locate historical events and act as place markers for both navigational and community building purposes. Place-names were of particular importance, particularly for the Western Apaches of Arizona who continue to use place names to recount lessons and to teach young community members ethics and survival skills. Without knowledge of these stories or the original contexts for place-names, can the landscape still act as a teaching tool for newcomers to the land, as well as to those whose connection to the land has been severed through white assimilation practices and re-education?